I8i -■ 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap, Copyright No 

85 Z& S3 

7A38 



Shell.. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Christianity 



VERSUS 



Orthodox theology, 



or, 



THE DECEPTION UNMASKED. 



"Take heed that no man deceive yon." 
— Matthew xxiv: 4. 



\ l> T T?T7" 



BY 

EVISBB, M. A. 



^Published for the Author by 

Gf,o. C. Jackson, 

AKRON, OHIO. 
l8qq. 



.Use 



38880 

Entered According to Act of Congress, 
in the year 1899, by 

A. B. DEVISEE, 

In the office of the Librarian of Congress, 
at Washington, D. C. 

Wu croFir it ** chived. 







TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Christianity, ok the Religion which 

Jesus taught to his Disciples, - 9 

CHAPTER II. 

Orthodox Theology — A New Way of 
Salvation— Paulism— Supern atur- 

ALISM, 51 

CHAPTER III. 

Constantine and the Church— The 
Reign of Faith without Reason — 
Demoralization and Degeneracy 
of the Church, 107 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Religious Reformation of the Six- 
teenth Century— Resume, 170 



4 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 



PREFACE. 

The attentive reader of the Scriptures will 
not fail to find in the New Testament two dis- 
tinct plans of salvation. The first of these plans 
is found in the four Gospels, and is the way 
which Jesus taught to his disciples. It is the 
religion of love : love God supremely and love 
thy neighbor as thyself. It is the religion of 
good fellowship, good works and deeds of char- 
ity and loving kindness one to another among 
men. "Whatsoever ye would that men should 
do unto you do ye even so to them: for this is 
the law. ' ' By this plan salvation is the reward 
of obedience to the law, which is God's will, the 
highest of all law. "If ye would enter into life 
keep the commandments." If one commits a 
wrong, let him repent and ask the heavenly 
Father to forgive him, and he will surely be 
forgiven. 

The reader will find nothing lacking in this 
plan of salvation. It is complete and perfect. 



PREFACE. 



This is the way which the Christ taught to the 
world of mankind and is appropriately denom- 
inated Christianity. 

The second plan or way of salvation will be 
found in Paul' s epistles to the various churches. 
This plan is by God's free grace and not by the 
the law. Says Paul: "By grace are ye saved 
through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is 
the gift of God. Not of works lest any man 
should boast." "A man is justified by faith 
without the deeds of the law." "By the deeds 
of the law there shall no flesh be justified." 

The fundamental fact on which Paul bases 
his theory of salvation is the dogma of original 
sin, the condemnation of the entire human race 
to eternal woe on account of the sin of Adam. 
This necessitated the sacrifice of Christ to re- 
deem the fallen race from this original sin. The 
subordinate or incidental doctrines involved in 
Paul's plan of salvation and taught by the or- 
thodox churches, are the divinity of Christ; his 
incarnation; the trinity of the God-head; the 
doctrine of election or the calling of some to be 
saved irrespective of their sins; vicarious atone- 



6 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

meiit; the sure effect of Christ's sacrifice to save 
the lost; the imputement of Christ's merits to 
the salvation of unrepentant sinners; faith 
wholly unrational and underived, and others. 
Let this suffice for a rough statement of Paul's 
scheme of salvation. Whatever this ma}* be it 
surely is not Christianity. It is a system of in- 
comprehensible mysteries every feature of 
which is supernatural. To distinguish it from 
Christianity we denominate it Paul ism. 

It will be seen at a glance that these two plans 
differ the one from the other, as widely as the 
heavens from the earth. 

At a very early period, probably during the 
life-time of Paul, for one cause or another, the 
leaders of the church embraced Paul's doctrines 
to the prejudice of the plan of salvation as 
taught by Christ. Having adopted Paulism 
they misnamed it Christianity, and in due 
course made it the creed or constitution of the 
orthodox church. And the so-called Christian 
church has for eighteen centuries been falsely 
masquerading in the guise of Christianity. 

The impossibility of comprehending the 



PREFACE. 7 

teachings of Paul and the uncertainty arising 
from two rival plans of salvation, threw the 
Christian world into doubt and spiritual anxi- 
ety; and caused schisms, divisions, sects, quar- 
rels, disputes and personal enmities without 
number in the very bosom of the church. The 
history of the Church from the da}-s of Paul 
to this time is but little else than a history of 
its disorders and lack of harmony. No other 
subject of human interest has engaged half the 
learning, labor and talent wdxich have been 
employed to establish and maintain Paulism 
as the creed of orthodox theology. 

The object of this little book is to point out 
the foregoing facts and to call the attention of 
ordinar3 T readers to the great fact that the 
clergy of the orthodox churches of the present 
day (in so far as they adhere to their creed) 
are not teaching Christianity, but Paulism — 
doctrines widely different from Christianity and 
resting on no authority but the name of Paul 
alone. 

The argument is that after so long a trial, 
with results so little encourasrius: it is full time 



8 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THKOtOCY. 

to discard Paulism, root and branch, and to em- 
brace Christianity, a religion which no one 
doubts, the only true religion of humanity. 

In writing these essays I have taken no pains 
to disguise ray thoughts. In this age of free 
inquiry, I know of no reason wli3 T one should 
feel restrained in the expression of his opinion 
concerning religion more than in other matters. 
I have accordingly said plainly and directly 
what I think and believe. If I am wrong in 
an}- essential particular, I shall be glad to be 
corrected. A. B. L. 

Clyde, Ohio, March 31, 1899. 



CHRISTIANITY. 



CHAPTER I. 

Christianity, or the Religion which 
Jesus taught to his Disciplhs. 

In the four Gospels we have four separate 
and distinct accounts of the teachings and 
doings of the Savior while here among men. 
These accounts are the primal and only source 
of our knowledge of Christ and of the religion 
he taught. While these accounts differ one 
from another in some minor details, they 
agree substantially in all essential particulars. 
I propose, in a brief essay, to give an outline 
sketch of the religion which the Savior taught 
to his disciples, as the same appears on the face 
of the four Gospels. 

Before proceeding, it is proper to sa3< T that, 
so far as concerns this essay, we wholly ignore 
the question of the divinity of Christ. In 
an}' case his religion must be judged on its 
merits, as these commend it to the human 



10 CHRISTIANITY VKRSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

understanding ; and if this religion, as a 
whole, thus commends itself as true, it matters 
not whether the teacher was divine, or merely 
human. 

In the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus 
announced to his disciples the object of his 
mission. This he did in terms that could 
leave no doubt in their minds as to the char- 
acter of the work which he proposed to under- 
take. "Think not that I am come to destroy 
the law or the prophets. I am not come to 
destroy, but to fulfill." (Matt. 5:17). What 
law ? What is the law to which the Savior 
alludes? When the pharisee asked Jesus : 
"Which is the great commandment in the 
law?" Jesus answered : " Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart. This is the 
first and great commandment. And the second 
is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself. On these two commandments 
hang all the law and the prophets." (Matt. 
22: 36 to 40). 

After some very apt and specific instruc- 
tions illustrating the scope and development 



CHRISTIANITY. 11 

of the second commandment, Jesus, dropping 
particulars, sums up in a single expression, all 
the obligations and duties which men mutu- 
ally owe to each other : "Therefore, all things 
whatsoever ye would that men should do to 
you, do ye even so to them: for this is the laze 
and the prophets." Matt. 7:12. These cita- 
tions leave no doubt as to what was the law 
which the Savior came to fulfill This is the 
law because it is the expression of the Sover- 
eign Will. It is the line traced for the spirit- 
ual guidance of man in this erring world. It 
is the line that separates right from wrong, 
truth from error. All our discursions, how- 
ever widely they may range in search for 
an ultimate basis or standard of moral 
truth or right, end here. The whole duty of 
man in his relation to his fellow- beings is 
summed up in this expression so plain, so com- 
plete and so comprehensive, that the simplest 
can scarcel}' fail to understand and appl} r it — 
"All things whatsoever ye would that men 
should do to you, do ye even so to them, for, 
(because) this is the law." God's command- 



12 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOL-OGY. 

ments are the expression of his will and are 
authority because they emanate directly from 
God, the Sovereign ruler of all. 

Such is the law which Christ came to fulfill. 
It is the way to life, to the higher and better 
life. Jesus was not himself enacting this law, 
as the expression of His will. He was only 
declaring the existing law which he had come 
to revive and make operative again among his 
people. This law was as old as the time when 
Moses led the hosts of Israel through the Red 
Sea; and when he communed with Jehovah 
face to face and received from him the law on 
Mount Sinai. It is, indeed, the divine, fun- 
damental, moral law of man's being, stamped 
by the hand of the Creator on the heart and 
the understanding of all men everywhere. 
Like man}' human laws this law of human 
rectitude has annexed thereto rewards and 
penalties. It is the nature of man to feel the 
impress of this law and to enjoy its merited 
rewards of obedience — peace, joy and the pure 
felicities that always wait upon the doing of 
God's will; and to suffer the alternative pen- 



CHRISTIANITY. 13 

alties of disobedience — pain, grief, remorse, 
fear and spiritual agony even to despair. 

CHRIST'S MISSION. 

In the beginning of his ministry Jesus, no 
doubt considered his mission limited to the 
Jews. "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep 
of the house of Israel." (Matt. 15: 24.) He 
even hesitated to bestow a blessing on a non- 
Jew. And when he commissioned his Twelve 
and sent them out to teach and preach his 
religion, he carefully instructed them: "Go 
not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any 
city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But go 
rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." 
(Matt. 10:5, 6.) But he manifestly afterwards 
changed his purpose and enlarged the sphere 
of his labor to embrace the Gentiles as well. 
"Go ye into all the world and preach the Gos- 
pel to every creature. (Mark 16:15. See 
Matt. 24: 14; 28:19; Luke 24:47). Jesus 
found the Jews perverse and obstinately op- 
posed to his doctrine and was thus compelled 
to abandon his purpose to reform them. He 



14 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

made very few proselytes from the Jews. It 
soon became obvious to his comprehension 
that his mission would be a failure unless he 
could establish his kingdom among the non- 
Jews. Hence his change of program. The 
incorrigibleness of the Jews was, no doubt, 
the real cause of this change; and the parable 
of the king who made a wedding feast for his 
son, as related in the 22nd chapter of Matthew 
1- 10, is obviously the apology for this change. 
This change of purpose is also evidenced by 
Jesus' unmeasured denunciation of the scribes 
and pharisees. (Matt. ch. 15 and ch. 23). 

Jesus had been born and reared in the Jew- 
ish faith. He had no doubt read and was 
familiar with the injunctions of the Jewish 
Scriptures: Ye shall not steal; neither deal 
falsely; neither lie one to another. And ye 
shall not swear by my name falsely. Neither 
shalt thou profane the name of thy God. Thou 
shalt not defraud thy neighbor, neither rob 
him; the wages of him that is hired shall not 
abide with thee all night until the morning. 
Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a 



CHRISTIANITY. 15 

stumbling block before the blind. Ye shall 
do no unrighteousness in judgment. Thou 
shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor 
honor the person of the mighty, but in right- 
eousness shalt thou judge thy neighbor. Thou 
shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer 
among the people; thou shalt not hate thy 
neighbor in thy heart. Thou shalt not in any 
wise rebuke thy neighbor and not suffer sin 
upon him. Thou shalt not avenge nor bear 
any grudge against the children of thy people, 
but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. 
(Leviticus, ch. 19. See Exodus, ch. 20.) 

Jesus was no doubt familiar with all these 
Scriptures of the Jewish law. But he saw 
that, however faithfully these may have been 
observed and obe} T ed in former times, in his 
day the Jewish religion had degenerated into 
a system of lifeless, unspiritual forms and 
ceremonies, and that the spirit of true religion 
was wholly wanting. Boldry announcing that 
he is come to save that which was lost, he de- 
nounces the Jews unsparingly. He character- 
izes them as hypocrites and blind leaders of the 



1(3 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

blind. "Woe unto you, scribes, pharisees, 
hypocrites ! for ye pay tithe of mint and 
annise and cummin, and have omitted the 
weightier matter of the law: judgment, mercy 
and faith." Ye impose grievous burdens on 
your fellows. Ye shut up the kingdom of 
heaven against men; for ye neither go in your- 
selves, neither suffer ye them that are entering 
to go in. Ye devour widows 1 houses and for 
a pretense make long prayers. Of fair exter- 
ior you are full of extortions and excess — -full 
of dead men's bones and of all uiicleanness. 
And finally, "Ye compass sea and land to 
make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye 
make him twofold more the child of hell than 
yourselves. " (Matt. ch. 23). 

A terrible picture, surely, of religious degen- 
erac} 7 . It was to correct this, to reform the Jew- 
ish religion and to bring the people back to a 
practical knowledge of God's law of righte- 
ousness and of mutual love and fellowship that 
Christ undertakes. His effort is to enable the 
people to comprehend and appreciate the per- 
fect excellence of the law about which the Jews 



CHRISTIANITY. 17 

prated so much and practiced so little. He in- 
genuously tells his followers: "Straight is the 
gate and narrow is the way' ' which leads to 
that higher and better life to which he is trying 
to lead them; (Matt. 7: 14) and he labors in- 
cessantly and with the utmost pains to illumi- 
nate and to make visible and plain to all that 
narrow way that they might delight to walk 
therein. 

The great Teacher was an extraordinary per- 
sonality. His whole soul was enthused with 
the work in which he was engaged. His exalted 
spirit was able to view the situation from a 
higher plane than his cotemporaries could do. 
His view comprehended the entire existence of 
man here and hereafter. In the broad sweep 
of his vision he saw that man, after the brief 
day of this life is over, is destined to an endless 
life in a higher and nobler sphere. He felt how 
transient, trifling, unreal and unsatisfying, at 
best, are the enjoyments of this life as com- 
pared with those in store for those who do the 
will of God. He saw the whole world of man- 
kind astray in by and forbidden paths, blindly 



18 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

groping their way in darkness and pain, while 
a richer and brighter life is freely offered to 
all who will seek after it; and his great sonl 
yearned to rescue and redeem them from their 
prison house of sin and to place them in the 
way of light and eternal life. 

THE LOGICAL BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Jesus, in the outset and without stopping to 
offer proof of what seemed to him an obvious 
and indisputable truth, assumed that God is 
God over all, that he is the Creator and 
Author of all, and that to his will, his law, is 
due the homage and obedience of all his crea- 
tures. "Call no man your father upon the 
earth for one is your Father which is in heav- 
en." (Matt. 23:9) In like manner he assumes 
the immortality of the soul. On these self evi- 
dent propositions he founds his doctrines. 
Nothing can be more absolutely consistent 
with reason or more in harmony with the 
human affections than the manner of his treat- 
ment of the relations and duties connecting man 
to his Maker. God is our heavenly Father; and 



CHRISTIANITY. 19 

we are his children. Thus by the mere choice 
of words is at once established between the 
author of the human race and each of* its 
members the relation of father and child with 
all the endearments, affectionate ties, and mu- 
tual obligations of that closest and most en- 
dearing relation. The earthly father is the 
head of the family and knows more than his 
children; and, b}^ virtue of his head-ship, par- 
ental authority and greater wisdom, knows 
.better what the child needs than the child 
itself knows. Children naturally feel that rev- 
erence and obedience are due to their parents 
to whom they look lor advice, instruction, 
guidance and support. They have no other 
resource but their parents. And the heart of 
man is so organized that one of his greatest 
pleasures comes from supplying the reason- 
able natural wants of his children. "If his 
son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or 
if he ask a fish will he give him a serpent? If 
ye, then, being evil, know how to give good 
gifts to your children, how much more shall 
your Father which is in heaven give good 



20 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

things to them that ask him." Jesus, in full 
harmony with this filial relationship, teaches 
his disciples to pray, not to a God of wrath 
and vengeance, a consuming fire, but to "Our 
Father which art in heaven," who is full of 
love, compassion and tender mercy toward all 
those who seek to do his will. What can be 
more reasonable than for children with such 
a Father to be obedient and loving? 

As we are all children of one Father, so are 
we all brethren. And as members of one and 
the same family, all on a common level one 
with another, all affected by like wants and 
weaknesses, defects and sinful tendencies and 
all alike needing mutual aid and support, we 
ought to love one another, forbear each other's 
faults, freely pardon all offences and thus pre- 
serve and promote the harmony and happiness 
of all. This is just what our heavenly Father 
desires of his children. IyOve your neighbor as 
you love yourself. Your neighbor is your 
brother. Do him no wrong, but do him all the 
good you can, because he is your brother and the 
child like yourself, of the heavenly Father. 



CHRISTIANITY. 21 

God knows that if we truly love one another 
there will be an end of strife and enmities 
among men everywhere, and peace and har- 
mony will prevail, and that will be the 
kingdom of heaven. 

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 

The kingdom of heaven occupies a very 
conspicuous place in the first three Gospels. 
This phrase seems to be synonomous with 'The 
kingdom of God. " The one or the other of 
these expressions meets the eye of the reader- 
very often in the pages of Matthew, Mark and 
Luke; but neither of them is found in John. 
The general effect of reading these three Gos- 
pels is, that the establishment of the kingdom 
of heaven is the final consummation of Christ's 
mission. This is the goal towards which 
he is always striving and towards which he- 
labors to direct his followers. But the phrase 
is used so variously and in so many different 
connections, that it is not easy to fix in the 
mind a clear idea of what the kingdom of 



22 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THKOLOGY. 

heaven precisely is. To illustrate we make a 
few references. 

Men are everywhere invited and urged to 
get into the kingdom of God as the goal of 
their salvation. 

On the other hand: ''The kingdom of God 
is within you." (Luke 17:21). 

It puzzles the average reader to understand 
how the kingdom of God can be in a man and 
the man to be in the kingdom of God at the 
same time. 

Says the Savior: "My kingdom is not of 
this world." (John 18:36). 

Again he says: "Blessed be ye poor; for 
yours is the kingdom of God." (Luke 6:20). 

How are the poor to have the blessings of 
the kingdom of God if that kingdom is not of 
this world? 

Again all are commanded to seek the king- 
dom of heaven. At the same time all are as- 
sured that the kingdom of heaven is coming 
to them and indeed is come. 

Jesus says: "From the days of John the 
Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suf- 



CHRISTIANITY. 23 

fereth violence and the violent take it by 
force." (Matt. 11:12). 

On another occasion, Jesus tells the Chief 
Priests and Elders in the temple: '"The king- 
dom of God shall be taken away from you 
and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits 
thereof." (Matt. 21:43). 

These various characterizations of a thing 
not tangible or realizable to the senses but rest- 
ing only in language, are more calculated to 
confuse one's perceptions than to enlighten 
them. They incline one to imagine that "The 
kingdom of heaven" was, perhaps, only a con- 
venient name for the new regime which they 
expected the Messiah to inaugurate, a com- 
mon rallying word for the adherents of the 
new order. But this apparent confusion of ideas 
should not lead us to suspect that Jesus him- 
self had not a clear conception of what he 
proposed to do. But the intellect of the peo- 
ple to whom he was laboring to impart his 
ideas, was exceedingly dull of comprehension 
and he accordingly varied his language and 
-illustrations to adapt his lessons to their vary- 



2± CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOEOGY. 

ing and little capacity. It is no doubt in this 
view that the great Teacher resorted so fre- 
quently to the use of parables as a means of 
instruction. He tells them: "The kingdom of 
heaven is likened unto a man who sowed good 
seed in his fie^d" etc. 

"The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of 
mustard seed." 

"The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven 
which a woman hid in three measures of meal. " 

"The kingdom of heaven is like unto a trea- 
sure hid in a field." 

"The kingdom of heaven is like unto a mer- 
chant man seeking goodly pearls." 

"The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net'*' 
etc. (For all these see Matt. ch. T3). 

If the characterizations first alluded to 
leave the meaning of the phrase in doubt, the 
parables do but little to remove that doubt. It 
might be an interesting puzzle to propound to 
a party of young people even in this day, to 
guess: What is that thing which is like so 
many things totally dissimilar one to another? 
While the parables are all more or less des- 



CHRISTIANITY. 25 

criptive of one or another of the Christian 
virtues, and teach us what every follower of 
Christ should practice, still these fail, like the 
other characterizations, to define the kingdom, 
of heaven. There is still one resource. 

Who are fit subjects for the kingdom ot 
heaven? We will perhaps get the best idea of 
what the kingdom of heaven really is, or was 
in the mind of the Savior, by examining its 
contents: Who are they that may enter there- 
in ? 

The kingdom of God consists of "The pure 
in heart: Of those who hunger and thirst after 
righteousness: Of the merciful: Of peace mak- 
ers:" (Matt. eh. 5). Of little children and of 
those who accept Christ's teachings as little 
children. (Matt. 18:3; Mark 10:15). Of those 
who do the will of God. (Matt. 12:50): Of all 
those who repent of their evil deeds and seek 
to know the truth: Of those who love their 
neighbors, forgive all their offenses and do 
good to them whether friends or foes. (Matt. 5). 
But let no one deceive himself with the beliet 
that any sham repentance, that anything short 



26 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

of a sincere desire to forsake his sins and do 
the will of God, can succeed. "Not every one 
that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into 
the kingdom of heaven: but he that doeth the 
will of nry Father which is in heaven. " (Matt. 
7:21). ' 'Except your righteousness shall exceed 
the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees, 
ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of 
heaven." (Matt. 5-20). 

To be a fit subject for the kingdom of God 
one must subordinate all other motives, his 
avarice, coveteousness and selfishness in all 
their forms and his Worldly ambitions as well. 
It is needful to man to know that "A man's 
life consisteth not in the abundance of the 
things which he possesseth," (Luke 12:15) to 
put him in the way of that higher life which 
the Savior taught. "Whosoever he be of you 
that forsaketh not all that he hath, he can- 
not be my disciple." (Luke 14:33). "Ye cannot 
serve God and Mammon." (Matt. 6:24). 

Perhaps the colloquy between the Savior and 
the rich 3 r oung man, narrated in the 19th 
Chapter Gf Matthew, is the most complete and 



CHRISTIANITY. 27 

instructive single text as to the qualifications 
required for entering into the kingdom of 
heaven. This, it will be noted, is not a para- 
ble or suppositious case, but an actual occur- 
rence. The young man inquires of the Savior: 

"What good thing shall I do that I may 
have eternal life?" The question is fundament- 
al ; it goes to the very bottom of Christ's teach- 
ings. The question, it will be observed, is not 
wdiat shall I believe, but what shall I do, to in- 
sure eternal life; and presupposes that the 
eternal life may be attained by the doing of 
good deeds. It is not supposable that, if the 
inquirer was wrong in this assumption, Christ 
would have suffered such an error to pass un- 
corrected. But it provokes not even the slight- 
est comment from the great Teacher, which 
clearly authorizes us to infer that^the inquirer 
was right in that supposition. But we have no 
occasion to rely upon inferences. Christ's 
answer to the young man's inquiry is clear 
and direct : 

"If thou wouldst enter into life, keep the 
commandments." The question and answer 



28 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

taken together constitute an unqualified affirm- 
ation that the inquirer's assumption was 
correct and that therefore the way to salvation 
— to the kingdom of heaven, to eternal life, is 
by obedience to the law. 

The young man, as the sequel shows, was 
evidently short on the second commandment. 
He had failed to comprehend the broad scope 
and true meaning of the injunction: "Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." But I find 
nothing in the four gospels to diminish or vary 
the plain import of the Savior's language and 
teaching everywhere, to the effect that salva- 
tion — eternal life — is the reward of obedience 
to the law, and is therefore not of grace, and 
not of faith. 

"If ye keep my commandments, ye shall 
abide in mf- love; even as I have kept my 
Father's commandments and abide in His 
love." (John 15:10). 

' 'He that hath my commandments and keep- 
eth them, he it is that loveth me; and he that 
loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I 



CHRISTIANITY. 29 

will love him and will manifest myself to 
him." (John 14:21). 

"If a man love me he will keep my words 
and my Father will love him." (John 14:23). 

These citations from John do but confirm 
the teachings of the other gospels. On the 
whole may we not justly conclude that: "The 
kingdom of heaven" is the reign of God's will 
in the heart of man ? 

THE INTELLECTUAL BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

In view of the mythical and supernatural 
signification attached to religious faith in the 
current Christian Theology, it will be instruct- 
ive to note the motive of the Savior as evinced 
in his method of teaching. It is patent every- 
where on the face of the first three gospels that 
Jesus addressed his lessons solely to the ra- 
tional understanding of his hearers. A mere in- 
spection of the texts as we find them recorded 
reveals the unmistakable purpose of the Teach- 
er to insure to his disciples a full intellectual 
comprehension of his doctrines as the basis of 
their faith in the truth of his religion. It is 



30 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

their understanding that he relies on. He 
makes no appeals to their faith, their passions, 
prejudices or fears. He does not urge them to 
accept and believe anything which they do not 
understand; and he takes great pains to make 
his instructions appear rational and therefore 
comprehensible to the common understanding. 
"He opened his mouth and taught them." His 
language to the multitude is: "Hear and under- 
stand." (Matt. 15: 10). "Hearken unto me, 
every one of you and understand. " (Mark 7: 14). 
Let one read the Sermon on the Mount with a 
special view of discovering the motive of the 
Teacher. Every line reveals the direct purpose 
of the Teacher to convey to the hearer a men- 
tal perception of the truth of what he was 
teaching. The Teacher himself saw the truth 
and the boundless wealth of joy embraced in it 
and his spirit yearned to assist others to know 
it and to feel it as he did. He knew that obe- 
dience to the law insures everlasting life, and 
he makes haste to tell them what the law is 
and how to obey it: Be merciful and kind to 
all. Be just in your dealings. Be charitable 



CHRISTIANITY. 31 

in your judgments of others, remembering 
that you are yourself imperfect. (Matt. 7:1-5)- 
Subdue your passions and moderate your ambi- 
tions lest they lead you out of the straight 
path. (Matt. 18:7-9). Be mindful of the poor 
to relieve their distress according to your abil- 
ity and opportunity. Love your neighbor as you 
love yourself. (L,uke 10: 30-37). The scope of 
this injunction is very broad. It seems to 
embrace the whole human family. For a 
perfect sample of oral teaching read the 
last six verses of the fifth chapter of 
Matthew. "I say unto you, love your ene- 
mies, bless them that curse you, do good 
to them that hate yon." Why? "That ye 
may be the children of your Father in heaven" 
who is absolutely impartial in dispensing his. 
blessings. "For he maketh his sun to rise on 
the evil and the good and sendeth rain on the 
just and on the unjust." With such an exam- 
ple of impartiality before your eyes what right 
have you to be partial in your treatment of 
your fellow beings? That is what God does and 
we should do as much like God as possible. 



32 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

But as if this were not enough to justify the 
injunction to love and do good to one's ene- 
mies, and in order to make this instruction 
appear entirely reasonable and satisfactory to 
all, he adds: "For if ye love them which love 
you what reward have ye ? Do not even publi- 
cans the same ?" 

"And if 3'e salute your brethren only, what 
do ye more than others? Do not even the 
publicans so?" 

It is no merit to love those who love, you, 
though it would be a great demerit not to love 
them. But to love those who hate you is a pos- 
itive merit which wins the approval of our 
heavenly Father. And in addition to these rea- 
sons, why a man should love and do good to 
his enemy, it no doubt occurred to, or was sug- 
gested to them, that by this mode of treatment 
they might reclaim and rescue a fellow man 
from error and thus lift him to a higher plane 
of life. 

Again : Christ teaches his disciples to pray 
to God : "Forgive us our debts as we forgive 
our debtors." Observe the care he takes to 



CHRISTIANITY. 33 

show the reasonableness of this. "For if ye 
forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly 
Father will also forgive you: But if ye for- 
give not men their trespasses, neither will 
your Father forgive your trespasses. " (Matt. 
6: 12 to 15; see also the parable of the king, 
Matt. 18: 23 to 35). 

The beautiful parable of the Sower so famil- 
iar to all readers of the Gospel affords another 
striking illustration of the earnest effort of the 
Savior to impart to his hearers an accurate 
conception of his religion and of the manner 
of propagating it. His disciples asked him : 
"Why speakest thou to them in parables?" 
In answer to this question he tells them: 
"This people's heart is waxed gross and their 
ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have 
closed, lest at any time they should see with 
their eyes, and hear with their ears and should 
understand with their heart* and should be 
be converted. Therefore speak I to them in 

* Note : — "In the time of Christ the human heart, 
and not the brain, was supposed to be the seat of the 
intellect 



34: CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

parables; because they seeing, see not, and 
hearing, they hear not, neither do they under- 
stand." He saw at once the utter incapacity 
of the masses to comprehend the abstract ideal 
which he desired to communicate to them, 
and like a true teacher, attempts to convey 
his idea in a concrete form, that the truth 
might somehow find a lodgment. He makes 
no appeals to the faith, volition, fears or 
prejudices of the people. His sole purpose is- 
to plant the seed of truth in the rational 
understanding. He wants them to have a 
reasonable comprehension of his doctrines. 
If he can set them to thinking of the reason 
why so little of the seed grew successfully, 
and why so much of it failed to bear fruit, 
they may at length be able to apply such 
thoughts to the more recondite subject of the 
kingdom of heaven and to see clearly how it 
is that only a comparative few are in the 
kingdom of heaven by virtue of their obedi- 
ence to God's will, while many are astray 
outside. "He that receiveth seed into the 
good ground is he that heareth the word and 



CHRISTIANITY. 35 

understandeth it." The explanation of the 
parable, as a whole, is a perfect picture of 
what may be seen in every community of 
Christendom. 

But it is needless to multiply proofs of a 
fact in evidence on every page of the four 
gospels. 

It is alleged and no doubt believed by many 
that Jesus resorted to miracles to attest his 
divine origin and character. But we must not 
fail to distinguish the Teacher from his doc- 
trines. The religion which Christ taught is 
something quite apart from the Teacher, him- 
self ; and while, as many believe, Jesus re- 
sorted to miracles in support of his divine 
character, he never dishonored the religion he 
taught by such methods. His doctrines bear 
the impress of truth, and need no such authen- 
tication . These stand upon their own base and 
can stand on no other. His doctrines are ad- 
dressed to the plain, normal understanding and 
he seeks to establish them nowhere else. "And 
many more believed because of his own words. ' ' 
(John 4: 41; 5: 24). An adequate knowledge 



36 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

of the truth induces belief of that truth; 
and belief in the truth of Christ's teachings 
begat fa ith in the Teacher. This was the true 
faith of Christ's followers. What other faith 
but that of Truth and Reason does a Christian 
need ? As a reasonable being what other Faith 
is possible to man. 

FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 

The greatest of God's mercies is forgiveness. 
Jesus plainly foresaw that whatever might be 
the attractions of his religion, however per- 
fectly adapted that religion might be to the 
wants of mankind, all would not accept it. He 
saw that man, constituted as he is, and sur- 
rounded as he is in the midst of so many 
worldly cares and allurements, would be 
diverted, in one way and another, from giving 
to his religion the attention it deserved, and 
would carelessly continue to drift along in the 
ways of error and unrighteousness as before. 
This expectation is beautifully displayed in the 
parable of the Sower. (Matt. ch. 13). He 
therefore assures his followers that God is as 



CHRISTIANITY. 37 

merciful as he is just, and that he desires the 
salvation of all (Matt. 18: 14); and therefore 
delights to pardon the transgressions of all who 
earnestly seek the ways of truth and life. "Ali 
manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven 
unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy 
Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. ' ' (Matt. 
12: 31; Mark 3: 28). (As theologians have not 
been able to determine with any considerable 
degree of certainty what this excepted sin is 
we make no account of it) . No doctrine is more 
clearly or fully taught in the first three gospels, 
(it is not mentioned at all in John), than the 
forgiveness of sins. But this free pardon which 
God promises for our transgressions and viola- 
tions of his law is on two conditions: 

( 1 ) Repentance. ' 'Christ came to call sinners 
to repentance. " (Matt. 9: 13). Repentance 
true, sincere and heartfelt, is a condition pre- 
cedent to pardon. "Except ye repent ye shall 
all perish." (Luke 13: 3). "The time is ful- 
filled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand : 
repent ye and believe the gospel. ' ' ( Mark 1:15). 
"And the disciples went out and preached that 



38 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

men should repent." (Mark 6: 12). It is said 
that "There is joy in heaven over one sinner 
that repenteth." (Luke 15: 7). "It behooved 
Christ to suffer .... And that repentance and 
remission of sins should be preached in his 
name, among all nations, beginning at Jerusa- 
lem." (Iyiike 24: 47). 

Can anything be more reasonable th^n this 
requirement? On the other hand, would it not 
seem to the ordinary understanding most un- 
reasonable in man to ask forgiveness without 
this repentance ? The king (in Hamlet) in the 
agony of his soul, incredulously exclaims: "May 
one be pardoned and retain the offense?" Jesus 
tells his followers, in effect that God desires the 
salvation of all his people and has prescribed a 
very easy and natural way by which they may 
attain that salvation. But you are not in the 
way which God has prescribed, and you can 
never find it in any other. Therefore I say to 
you "Repent and believe the gospel," which 
teaches you the way to the better life. I see 
in you the elements of a higher life and that 
the conditions are fairly favorable, if you will 



CHRISTIANITY. 39 

only open your eyes to see the vast opportuni- 
ties and possibilities of this earthly existence, 
to see the truth and obey it. You are all in the 
wrong way. You have all sinned against your 
Maker by departing from his law, and there is 
no help for you but to forsake your former ways 
and submit yourself to the will of your Maker 
and follow and obey his laws, subordinate 
your passions, your pride, your ambition, all of 
which are daily leading you out of the true way. 
Subject yourself to God's will under the guid- 
ance of your reason and knowledge of the truth, 
obeying in all things the will of your heavenly 
Father which is your reasonable duty. On these 
conditions God will pardon your sins. 

The man that cannot accept and perform such 
a condition for such a purpose, has lost his 
reason or has never learned properly to use it. 

There is also another condition precedent to 
God's pardon. 

(2) Mutual forgiveness -one to another among 
men. When we pray to God, even when our 
lips formally repeat the language of the Lord's 
prayer; we say: "Forgive us our debts as we 



40 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

forgive our debtors." (I apprehend that if the 
whole truth were known, we thus often pray for 
our own condemnation). "For if ye forgive 
men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will 
forgive you; but if ye forgive not men their 
trespasses, neither will your Father forgive 
your trespasses." (Matt. 6: 12 - 15). The 
king showed no mercy to the servant who op- 
pressed his fellow servant and refused to foi- 
give his debt; "So likewise shall my heav- 
enly Father do also unto you, if ye from your 
hearts forgive not every one his brother their 
trespasses." (Matt. 18: 35.) "Forgive and ye 
shall be forgiven." (Luke 6: 37). The sinner 
who asks God for pardon must come with clean 
hands. No man may ask God to forgive his 
transgressions who does not freely forgive the 
offenses which his fellow men commit against 
him. "Be ye therefore merciful as your Father 
also is merciful." (Luke 6: 36). "Therefore if 
thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there re- 
memberest that thy brother hath aught against 
thee, leave there thy gift before the altar and 
go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother 



CHRISTIANITY. 41 

and then come and offer thy gift." (Matt. 5,, 

23, 24). 

On these conditions, and I believe these are 
the only ones required, man is offered the for- 
giveness of his sins. We are aware that bap- 
tism is once mentioned as a condition but this 
is not generally held by theologians as a saving 
ordinance. We are also aware that there are 
other texts which have been construed as 
requiring belief in the divinity of Christ as a 
condition of salvation. (Mark 16, 16; John 3: 
iS, 19, 36). These scriptures are more or less 
ambiguous; and, though they may bear the 
construction suggested, it is far more reason- 
able to make them conformable to the teach- 
ings of Christ in general touching this question. 
Nor is God's mercy exhausted b}^ a single par- 
don. It lasts as long as the culprit can repent, 
even to seventy times seven. (Matt. iS: 21, 

22). 

Nor are these conditions something super- 
added to the former requirements of a religious 
life. These are included in the great summary 
of Christian duty, the Golden Rule. " Whatso- 



42 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

ever ye would that men should do to you, that 
do ye even to them, for this is the law. ' ' For, 
if a man love his neighbor, he will surely 
speedil}" repent of any wrong or offense he 
ma}* have committed against him; and still 
more will he be ever read}* to forgive the of- 
fences of that neighbor against himself. 

Only two conditions to insure God's pardon 
of our sins and to restore us to the favor of 
our heavenly Father, however far we may have 
fallen away — Repentance towards God our 
Maker; and mutual forgiveness one to another! 
two virtues without which no man can ever 
progress, the very stepping stones to the higher 
life for which humanity yearns day and night. 
It is on these alone that is conditioned the for- 
giveness of our sins, a complete passport to the 
kingdom of heaven. 

Here is a Holy Trinity without the slightest 
mystery, without any atoning sacrifice, without 
any shedding of blood, any supernatural faith 
or stupendous miracle, a Trinity which ever}' 
Christian can easily understand and believe; and 
which he believes because lie does understand — 



CHRISTIANITY. 43 

Repentance, Mutual Love and Forgiveness. 
These and these alone insure man's salvation. 
These three Harmonies stand together as one 
for the salvation of all who do the will of God. 

Jesus seizes upon the relations which con- 
nect man with his Maker on the one hand, 
and with his fellow man on the other, as the 
starting point, the fundamental basis of his re- 
ligion. Man naturally and reasonably owes to 
his Creator true reverence, homage and obedi- 
ence to His will as the Sovereign Ruler of all ; 
and to his fellow-men, good faith, kindness, 
truth and justice, and whatsoever he would 
have others do to or for him. This is the nor- 
mal state of man, more ideal, no doubt, than 
real. For, owing to man's imperfect nature, 
his passions and weaknesses, he has not been 
able to keep in -that state of normal perfection. 
His undeveloped reason in the infancy and 
youth of his race, left him the victim of his 
appetites, which soon assumed control of his 
actions and led him to disregard and violate 
the moral laws of his being. His feeble and 



44 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

unenlightened reason failed to control the 
storm of passion in his soul, and he soon fell 
out of harmony with God and with his fellow 
men. Ever since discord and strife, unright- 
eousness and sin have prevailed among men. 
And at the coming of Christ the burthen of the 
prophets for ages had been to lament over this 
fallen condition, to exclaim against it and to 
denounce the rulers for their crimes and in- 
iquities and to threaten them with the most 
appalling vengeance of Jehovah. When Jesus 
came he saw and appreciated the situation. He 
saw the whole world of mankind living totally 
unmindful of God's will and of their mutual 
obligations towards one another, but, on the 
contrary, preying upon and devouring one 
another. He saw his own race, the Jews, the 
vaunted chosen people of God, steeped in su- 
perstition and vice and hypocritically practic- 
ing a multitude of so called religious rites and 
ceremonies as degrading, as void of any relig- 
ious merit in the sight of God, as were the 
practices of the heathen themselves. He saw 
that such conditions, left to themselves, lead 



CHRISTIANITY. 45 

only from bad to worse. Jesus also saw and 
felt in the impulses of his own great soul that 
man has within him capacity for a higher and 
better life than that he saw about him. 

It was the question of a remedy for this dis- 
tressing condition of affairs. He saw that 
man with all his weakness and tendency to err 
is endowed with the faculty of reason and o 
moral sense, which enable him to discriminate 
and distinguish between right and wrong, be- 
tween truth and error. Whoever can do these 
things is in the way to progress. The need of 
the case is light, knowledge. The remedy for 
this disorder, this wretchedness that every-, 
where abounds, is the law, God's law of right- 
eousness: love God with all your heart, and love 
your neighbor as yourself. This is the remedy. 
The only relief for you in your present misery 
and the only thing that can put you in the way 
of progress towards a better life is obedience to 
this law. Conform 3-our daily life to its re- 
quirements. You are out of harmony with 
God and with your fellows. You cannot 
progress or be happy until that harmon}- is 



46 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

restored* and obedience to the law can alone 
restore it. 

The religion which Christ taught to his 
disciples is the law of love applied in the 
full, broad sense in which the great Teacher 
propounded it. "Whatsoever ye would that 
men should do to }~ou, do ye even so to 
them," properly understood, embraces it all. 
It is not a religious dogma invented as a 
part, to bolster up a fictitious sj-stem. It is 
the great central fact or principle of human 
happiness and progress. It is the great 
fundamental moral law of man's being, im- 
pressed on the heart and the understanding 
of every son and daughter of Adam's race. 
It is the religion of love pure and simple. 
There is nothing new in it. It was old and 
as perfectly understood, as an abstract truth, 
when Abraham and his people wandered forth 
from Ur of the Chaldees to the land of 
Canaan, as it was in the time of the Savior, or 
as it is today. Nor is there in it anything 
artificial, subtile, mysterious or obscure, super- 
natural or unreasonable. It is preeminently 



CHRISTIANITY. 47 

the religion of Reason. It is addressed to 
the reason; the reason comprehends and 
accepts it, appropriates and applies it. Its 
requirements are wholty conformable to our 
wants temporal and spiritual, and place man in 
perfect harmony at once, with his Creator and 
with his fellow beings. This religion is as true 
philosophically as it is religiously. While it 
builds up and establishes the kingdom of heaven 
in the heart of the individual who practices it , 
it promotes the cause of humanity and in- 
creases the aggregate force of civilization in 
general. The man who, inspired with the love 
of peace and good will among men, dissuades 
his neighbor from avenging a wrong, or from 
committing a crime ; composes a strife between 
two hostile neighbors; or who freely forgives 
his neighbor a wrong committed against him- 
self, has thereby acquired to himself a positive 
increase of moral force and of joy and strength 
in his heart; has rendered a valuable service to 
the society in which he lives and has taught his 
neighbors a true practical lesson of Christian 
virtue which they cannot fail to understand and 



48 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

which may aid them in getting to the better 

way. 

All men are the children of the same heaven- 
ly Father; and every man is your brother. It 
matters not how defective and degraded he may 
be, he is still your brother. Do not make him 
an outcast; he is not an outcast, but a lost sheep 
to be sought after and reclaimed if possible. 
Take him by the hand. • It will comfort him. 
Lift him up. It will increase his confidence in 
himself and in you as a brother. Help him to 
employment if need be. Look after him. Visit 
him. Help him to feed and clothe his wife and 
children as the occasion may reasonably re- 
quire. Assist him in any way to respect him- 
self and to take care of himself. By this treat- 
ment of your unfortunate brother, you will en- 
rich the treasures of your own heart while you 
prove to the recipient of your favors that you are 
indeed a disciple of Christ, that you love your 
neighbor as yourself; and you will thus do much 
to convince him of the truth, worth and beauty 
of Christianity; and that it is not a hollow, hypo- 
critical sham as is too often believed. One such 



CHRISTIANITY. 49 

•example of practical Christianity among living 
men is worth many prayers and sermons. 

One of the inviting features of Christianity is, 
that every virtuous act brings its immediate re- 
ward. There is no room to doubt that every act 
■of obedience to God's will asset forth in the 
gospel of Christ, is amply rewarded in this life. 
We do not have to wait for a future life to 
■obtain the promised blessing. Every true 
disciple of Christ obtains a share in the 
greater life while here on earth. 

The remedy which Jesus found and preached 
to the people is ample and perfect for all that 
accept and apply it. The fault is not in the 
law, but in ourselves that we do not see the 
light and walk therein. It is the habitual dis- 
regard and violation of God's commandment 
to love our neighbor — the lack of that broth- 
erly love and good will one towards another, 
disposing men to be honest and just in all 
their dealings and intercourse with their 
fellow-men — it is these that cause the dis- 
cords, strifes and enmities among men and 
make so many men and women unhappy in 



50 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOEOGY. 

the world. From the beginning Christianity 
has encountered many obstacles to hinder its 
acceptance and forward march. Among these 
hindrances the greatest and most persistent 
has always been and is yet, selfishness. If man 
could once completely emancipate himself from 
the tyrranous dominion of selfishness and, 
guided by Reason, employ his energies in 
doing the will of his Maker, he would no 
doubt have a new revelation and a new life. 



ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 51 



CHAPTER II. 

Orthodox Theology — A New Way of Sal- 
vation— PAULISM— SUPERNATURALISM. 

Every great fact is connected with every 
other great fact, backward and forward, ex- 
tending through time and space. The link or 
tie that connects these facts is the eternal law 
of cause and effect. The orthodox theology 
of the nineteenth century is no exception to 
the universal law of causation. As a product 
it had its causes which produced it, causes 
of which it was born. If we would judge cor- 
rectly of the character of the offspring we nat- 
urally take account of the character of the 
antecedents, the parentage of that offspring. 
The orthodox theology of the nineteenth cen- 
tury is the heir, the successor, the offspring of 
the religions that preceded it; and in order to 
comprehend its constitution and peculiar char- 
acteristics, it is important to notice the general 



Oj CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

character and features of its ancestors. The 
immediate predecessor of the Christian religion 
was the Jewish or Mosaic religion. The early 
teachers and founders of the new or Christian 
religion, especially Jesus and Paul the apostle, 
had been reared in the Jewish faith. In view 
then of accounting for the character and form 
of the orthodox theology in the centuries fol- 
lowing the time of Christ and his Apostles, it 
will be important to briefly notice the charac- 
ter of the Jewish religion itself, which, no 
doubt imparted manj T of its features to the 
new religion. Let us then briefly inquire 
into the nature and character of 

THE JEWISH RELIGION. 

About seventeen centuries before the com- 
ing of Christ Moses led the Israelites out of 
their bondage in Egypt. The Israelites, em- 
bracing all the descendants of Abraham, 
whom Moses undertook to lead to the prom- 
ised land, Canaan, were an immense throng, 
603,550 males over the age of twenty 3-ears, 
(Numbers ch. 1), which, embracing all males 









the; Jewish rkugion. 53 

and females, old and young would probably 
give a total of two and a half millions of souls. 
These people had been in the strictest sense 
enslaved by the Egyptians for 230 years. 

"The Egyptians did set over them task-masters to 
afflict them with their burdens." "And the Egyptians 
made the children of Israel serve with rigor. And they 
made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar 
and brick, and in all manner of service in the field; all 
their service wherein they made them serve was with 
rigor." (Exodus 1:11, 12, 14). 

The natural effect of such a course of treat- 
ment so long continued, was to make the 
people mentally and morally rude, ignorant and 
unappreciative. The recitals of the narrative 
sufficiently show that they were in the strict 
sense extremely low in the scale of intellectual 
and moral development. Moses, seeing the 
magnitude of his undertaking, soon perceived 
the imperative need of some fixed rules, laws 
or regulations for the instruction, guidance 
and control of this vast mass of undeveloped, 
ignorant humanity. 

They had been three months out of Egypt; 



54 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOTOGY. 

had arrived at the foot of Mount Sinai and 
had pitched their camp there. Moses knew 
these people, had already frequently heard 
their unreasonable complaints, and no doubt 
felt deeply the weight of the problem of gov- 
erning them while educating and developing 
them. It was with him the question of form- 
ulating a system of laws adapted to the exi- 
gencies of the situation. The great lawgiver 
easily saw that he could not safely rely on the 
intelligence, the reason or the moral or relig- 
ious sentiment of this ignorant mass of ex- 
slaves, as a controlling principle. But the 
necessity of the case is to devise a plan by 
which they might be controlled, and which 
would at the same time develop their intel- 
lectual capacities and their moral and religious 
sentiments. He considered that in their bond- 
age they had been habitually governed by 
their task-masters through fear and violence 
and were inapt to recognize or obey any other 
or higher motive of obedience. Moses also 
evidently distrusted his ability to impose his 
unaided authority on this rude mass of people 



THE JEWISH REUGION. 55 

without some extraneous support. Hence the 
frequene}^ of the expression: "Thus saith the 
Lord God." 

Moses having taken all needful precautions 
to guard the secrecy of his interview (Exodus 
ch. 19), proceeds up into the Mount to com- 
municate with God and to receive from Him 
the laws for the people; and, after a prolonged 
absence, he returns to the people with the 
Tables of the Law written by God himself. 
"And He (God) gave unto Moses when he 
had made an end of communing with him on 
Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables 
of stone, written with the finger of God." (Ex- 
odus 31:18)... "And the writing was the writ- 
ing of God graven upon the tables." (Exodus 
32-15, 16). 

Such was the occasion and such were the 
circumstances in wmich was instituted the 
Jewish religion. That religion was born of the 
emergency. It was brought forth by Moses 
to meet the exigencies of a numerous people 
just snatched from the grasp of the most op- 
pressive bondage, a people ignorant, degraded, 



56 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

coarse and unimpressible, a stranger to all 
forms of government save only the arbitrary 
will of a task-master. These people had every 
thing to learn before they could properly as- 
sume and perform the duties of citizens in a 
social state. The law, the contents of those 
tables of stone, is supposed to be spread 
upon the records from chapter 20 to 31 inclu- 
sive of Exodus. Every clause is under the 
sanction of "Thus saith the Lord God." 
Here is, no doubt, the origin of the dogma of 
divine inspiration of the hoi 3^ scriptures. Here 
is the origin and foundation of that clause in 
the creeds of the protestant churches of the 
present day, requiring the neophyte to profess 
belief in the scriptures of the Old and New 
Testament as the word of God. These laws 
constitute at once a Civil Code and a Religion. 
They regulate the relations of the people, their 
duties and obligations of one to another, their 
labor and their rest, the observance of the 
Sabbath and the mode of keeping it. But the 
civil part of these laws is the least important. 
Their chief feature is the most elaborate and 



. 




THE JEWISH RELIGION. 57 

imposing religious ceremonial - ever invented 
and which was probably intended by the 
author as an educational means to catch the 
eye and occupy the attention of the people 
"-and to teach them to know and revere a Deity 
they did not see, and thus gradually to raise 
their thoughts to higher conceptions of the 
true object of worship. The whole system 
abounds in sacrifices. The religion Of Moses, 
however, is wholly limited in its application 
to the present life. There is nowhere a line 
or word indicating that Moses had any notion 
of a future state of being or of the immortality 
of the soul. Briefly, the Mosaic law was pre- 
pared for an idolatrous people, semi-barbarous 
and very ignorant of all the duties of free citi- 
zens in civilized life. Moses himself was but 
a half-civilized cruel despot; and the Deity 
whom he worshiped is a God of jealousy, 
anger, wrath and vengeance. The contents 
'V* v of a single chapter of the reputed Mosaic writ- 
ings, furnish ample proof of these assertions. 
- ! £ We quote from the thirty-second chapter of 
Exodus. 



3£ 



58 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

"And when the people saw that Moses delayed to 
come down out of the Mount, the people gathered 
themselves together unto Aaron and said unto him: 
Up, make us gods which shall go before us: For 
as for this Moses, the man that brought us out of 
the land 'of Egypt, we wot not what is become of 
him." (32:1). 

Aaron complied with the command of the 
people and made a golden calf and the people 
worshiped it. As a matter of history the 
Israelites, in all their history as a nation, con- 
tinued to apostatize and to lapse back into 

idolatry. 

When God saw this apostacy of his chosen 

people he said: 

"Now, therefore let me alone, that my wrath may 
wax hot against them, and that I may consume 
them." (32:10). 

Then Moses interposes in behalt of the 
people and says to God (almost in the tone of 

command) : 

"Why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy peopie. 
Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil 
against thy people. ' ' < 'And the Lord repented of the 
evil which he had thought to do unto the people." 
(32:12, 14). 



THE JEWISH REEIGION. 59 

In this act of that tragedy, (for it was a tra- 
gedy as will shortly appear) Moses seems to 
have outranked Jehovah and to overrule his 
purposes. But what a God is here described! 
Vacillating, weak, unstable, bloodthirsty and 
cruel. 

But, as Moses, approaching the camp, saw 
what had been done in his absence, 

' 'His anger waxed hot and he cast the tables out of 
his hand and brake them beneath the Mount. And 
ne took the calf which they had made, and burnt it 
in the fire and ground it to powder and strewed it upon 
the water and made the children of Israel drink of it." 
(32:19, 20). 

Now notice that Moses in the most inhu- 
man, bloodthirsty and cruel spirit, proceeds to 
do on his own account just what he had an 
hour before professed to have persuaded God 
not to do. 

"Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and 
said: who is on the Lord's side? Let him come unto me. 
And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together 
unto him. And he said unto them: thus saith the 
Lord God of Israel : Put every man his sword by his 
side and go in and out from gate to gate throughout 



60 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every 
man his companion, and every man his neighbor. And 
the children of Levi did according to the word of 
Moses : and there fell of the people that day about three 
thousand men." (32:26,27,28). 

Such is the origin and character of the Jew- 
ish religion; in which Christianity has its root; 
and from which are drawn some prominent 
features of the current orthodox theology of 
the nineteenth century. 

ORIGINAL SIN. 

The doctrine of Original Sin, or the sin of 
Adam, is the fruitful source of orthodox 
theology. It is claimed by the theologians 
that this transgression had the effect to damn 
eternally the whole human race. The matter 
is of sufficient importance to justif3 T a careful 
examination. 

In the second and third chapter of Genesis 
it is related that God placed Adam and Eve 
in a garden in which was the tree of life and 
knowledge. 

"And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, 
of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely cat: 
but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 



ORIGINAL SIN. 61 

thou shalt not eat of it: for , in the day thou eatest 
thereof thou shalt surely die." (Genesis ch. 2:16, 17). 
' 'And when the woman saw that the tree was good for 
food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree 
to be desired to make one wise : she took of the fruit 
thereof, and did eat; and gave also unto her husband 
with her, and he did eat." (Genesis 3:6). 

When God coming (, to walk in the garden 
in the cool of the day," finds out what had 
happened, He first curses the serpent who 
tempted and beguiled Eve. He then tells 
Eve : 

"I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy concep- 
tion; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and 
thy desire shall be unto thy husband and he shall 
rule over thee." (Genesis 3:16). 

"And unto Adam he said: Because thou hast heark- 
ened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the 
tree of which I commanded thee, saying: Thou shalt 
not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in 
sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life ; 
Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to thee; and 
thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy 
brow shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the 
ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou 
art and unto dust thou shalt return." (Genesis 3:17, 
18 and 19). 



i 



I 






62 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

These texts, I believe, embrace all the 
essential parts of the narrative of Adam's 
fall. Granting the perfect integrity and 
authenticity of the account of this tremen- 
— dous act as given, several considerations are 
-O deducible. 

(i) The penalties for this transgression 
are limited to this present natural life. The 
language used, "All the days of thy life;" 
"Till thou returnest unto the ground," prove 
this incontestably. And the nature of the 
penalties are such as can only apply to persons 
in this material state of existence. 

(2) There is not a line or word in the 
entire narrative giving the slightest hint that 
there is or may be any future life, or that man 
possesses any spirit or soul that survives the 
death and destruction of this body to live in any 
form or condition in a future state. Nor is there 
any such in the entire Mosaic writings. 

(3) Without manifest perversion of sense 
and without the grossest violation of the pro- 
prieties of language and common sense, material 
and temporal penalties, specially limited and 



JESUS IGNORES ORIGINAL SIN. 63 

only adapted to the present life, cannot be con- 
strued and interpreted into spiritual and eter- 
nal punishments in a future, spirit life. 

(4) Adam and Eve were created sinless, but 
subject or liable to sin, as is fully shown by the 
fact that they yielded to temptation and ate the 
fruit in violation of God's command. 

These considerations to the contrary notwith- 
standing, this childish fiction was accepted and 
enlarged by interpretation to apply spiritually 
as well as materially; and it was early in the 
history of the Christian church incorporated as 
a fundamental doctrine of orthodoxy. From 
that day to this the doctrine that Adam's trans- . 
gression involved the entire human race spirit- 
ually as well as materially in the woes of eter- 
nal perdition — that every child is born already 
condemned to eternal woe — has been and is 
yet the fundamental fact of orthodox theology. 

There is not a trace of this doctrine in any 
of the four gospels. Jesus obviously knew 
nothing of such a doctrine when he said broadly 
' 'All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be for- 
given unto men." He certainly did not know 



64: CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

that the whole human race had been already 
condemned to eternal damnation by reason of 
Adam's transgression. If he knew of such a 
doctrine he avoids all recognition of it. In his 
religion as taught in the sermon on the Mount 
and as he delivered it to his chosen disciples, 

y every individual is responsible for his own sins 
only. In the sermon on the Mount Jesus was 
formally disclosing to his disciples the charac- 
teristics and requirements of his religion; and 
as he was teaching it to them that they might 
teach it to others, we have a clear right to 
assume that he taught them all that was es- 
sential or needful to guide men in the way of 
life — to guide them to the kingdom of God. If 
it had been true that the whole human race was 
actually already under condemnation for the 
sin of Adam, from which they necessarily must 
be relieved before they can enter into life, or 
take a single step in that direction, can we con- 
ceive that he would have omitted to take 
account of a fact of such transcendant import- 
ance? Nor does he mention this doctrine when 
he sends out the twelve with formal instruc- 



A NEW WAY OF SALVATION. 65 

tions to preach his religion. The inference, 
indeed, is irresistible that neither Christ nor 
his disciples knew anything of this doctrine of 
original sin. It was the learned, metaphysical 
and zealous Paul who, sometime after the death 
of Christ, first deduced and formulated this doc- 
trine of original sin: "For, as in Adam all die, 
even so in Christ shall all be made alive." 
(First Corinthians 15 : 22). And thus, in the 
hands of the theologians it became the corner- 
stone of a stupendous system of fictions. 

A NEW WAY OF SALVATION, FAITH AND GRACE. 

When the rich young man asked Jesus: 
"What good thing shall I do that I may have 
eternal life?'.' Jesus' answer was: "If thou 
wouldst enter into life, keep the commandments. ' ' 
Love God and love your neighbor as you love 
yourself. Conform your daily life to the will of 
God. The kingdom of heaven consists of those 
who do the will of God. 

The Savior also taught that God desires the 
salvation of all men, and in pursuance of this 
desire, he stands ever ready to pardon the 



66 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

transgressions of all who sincerely repent of 
their sins and ask his forgiveness. This is 
the normal law of salvation and was the only 
one that Jesus seemed to know an}^thing of. 

On the other hand the priesthood — the 
teachers and theologians who came after 
Christ — seemed to think that Christ's plan of 
salvation is in some way faulty ; perhaps it 
is too natural and too reasonable ; or possibly 
too simple and easy to practice ; and they 
accordingly find another. Having adopted 
the doctrine of original sin, they must needs 
find a remedy for that calamity. They 
accordingly invent the plan of Salvation by 
Grace and Faith. Hence their answer to the 
young man's question : 

"By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not 
of yourselves; it is the gift of God. Not of works lest 
any man should boast. ' ' ( Bphesians 2:3, 9) . 

This change of plan implies that God saw 
the error and defect of his former plan of 
salvation and determined to change it. The 
change, however, is not the work of God, but 
plainly of man. Chiefly on these two doc- 



the; jews reject christ. 67 

trines of Grace and Faith, the early writers 
and teachers of theology have built a system 
which has prevailed in the church to this day 
and which I believe is radically and irrecon- 
cilably different from that which the Savior 
taught. We will attempt to give a brief out- 
line of that system. This will necessarily 
involve some references to the circumstances 
in which that system had its origin. 

Jesus announces that he is come to fulfill 
the law, — as I understand this, to reform the 
manners and religious practices of the people 
— and to teach them to know God as he is — 
that he is come to call sinners to repentance 
and that he is sent specially to the Jews. He 
inveighs strongly against the manners of the 
Jews, denounces their hypocrisies and super- 
stitious practices and commands them to 
repent. 

The Jews at the coming of Christ repre- 
sented one of the oldest, best established and 
most reputed religions in the world. That 
religion dated back to the early hours of man's 
day on the earth. Their scriptures had been 



•68 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

written and delivered to them by the hand of 
God himself amid the terrors of Monnt Sinai. 
The Jews were themselves the chosen people 
of God. They had Abraham for their father 
and boasted a long line of prophets and wise 
men. And they no doubt verily believed that 
the Hebrew race, the sons of Abraham, were 
the only truly religious people in the world. 
They were, therefore, not in a mood to relish 
being told by the Prophet of Nazareth of 
their sins and shortcomings. And when they 
became fully satisfied that Jesus had come in 
a spiritual character only, and not to restore 
the kingdom of David so long looked for and 
so devoutly desired, they wholly refused to 
accept Christ or his doctrines. Here was 
the parting of the ways. The peopje divide. 
Some adhere to the reformer; but many 
more follow him not. 

Both parties — adherents and opponents — 
proceed to extremes. Christ's enemies, the 
Jews, feared, hated and crucified the Savior. 
His friends and followers believed him, loved 
him and deified him. This deification of 



THE CHURCH DEIFIES CHRIST. 69 

Christ, or the doctrine of Christ's divine 
origin and character, was not established by 
any single act; but was first assumed from 
circumstances, then accepted and finally 
adopted as a dogma of the orthodox theology. 

In this greatest fact of human history did 
either party act unnaturally? The track of 
the Jewish race all the way back from the day 
when Moses in a momentary sally of passion 
had 3000 of his people slain to appease his 
wrath, to the coming of the Savior, had been 
traced in blood. It is all only a repetition of 
deeds of blood and violence. The Jews had 
lived all their lives under the reign of the 
force and fear of Jehovah's wrath. What 
was more natural to a semi- civilized people 
addicted to violence, treachery and falsehood, 
than to get rid of a dangerous agitator and 
religious foe once for all, by putting him to 
death. And this is precisely what the record 
shows. Violence and assassination had long 
been the custom of the times and the people. 

On the other hand it could not have been 
difficult for the people of that wonder-loving 



70 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

age to believe, or to accept as a belief, the doc- 
trine of Christ's divinity, or perhaps more 
correctly, that Jesus was himself God incar- 
nated. The age was unscientific and immeas- 
urably credulous. The Greek religion, or 
mythology, was a wonderful mixture of the 
human and the superhuman. Their gods 
themselves, are only men with superhuman 
powers. It was taught in the philosophy of 
the Greeks and Romans that good men be- 
come gods after death; and their deities, 
while they have superhuman attributes, have 
also all the characteristics of mortals. The 
renowned Greek hero, Achilles, was the son 
of a goddess. The analogue of Christ's 
divinity is found everywhere in the my thology 
of the Greeks. In that wonderful creation of 
the Hellenic imagination, the amours of the 
Olympian deities with the daughters of men 
constitute no small part. Jupiter had numer- 
ous offspring by human mothers. Hercules 
was the son of Jupiter by the maiden daughter 
of the king of Mycaenae. The divine Aes- 
culapius, the god of the healing art, was the 



THE CHURCH DEIFIES CHRIST. 71 

son of Apollo by an earthly mother. Both 
these — Hercules and Aesculapius — whose 
nature was a blending of the divine and 
human, were only great men while they 
lived, but, after death, they were counted among 
the gods. These ideas were not unknown 
to the people of western Asia. The campaigns 
of Alexander 300 years before Christ, and of 
the Romans afterwards, had disseminated 
these fancies and a thousand others similar 
broadcast from the Mediterranean to the Indus. 
And the idea of transforming a man into ja. god 
could not have been new or startling to the 
people of that age and time. In addition, the 
Jewish religion itself abounds in signs, won- 
ders and miracles. Such as the witch of 
Endor raising Samuel from his grave, after he 
had been dead several years (1st Samuel 
eh. 28); the story of Enoch translated to 
heaven before death (Genesis 5:23 and 24); 
the story of the prophet Elijah, as related in 
the second book of the Kings; how he brought 
down fire from heaven which consumed a cap- 
tain and fifty men, thrice repeated. (Ch. 1:10 



72 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

to 14). How he parted the waters of the river 
Jordan so that he and his companions passed 
over on dry land (Ch. 2:8); And how he was 
taken up to heaven alive in a chariot of fire. 
(Ch. 2:11). And how Aaron, the priest, cast 
a lot of gold rings and other bits of jewelry 
into the fire, "And there came out this calf" 
(Exodus 32:24). How Jonah lived three days 
and three nights in the belly of a whale; and 
how the whale obedient to God's command, 
then "spewed him up on dryland!" (Jonah 
2:10). , 

It would not seem that it should be difficult 
for a people, Jew T s and pagans, who were 
accustomed to regard such tales as truth, 
vouched for by Jehovah, to accept also the 
doctrine of Christ's divinity — his miraculous 
conception — his incarnation, God himself 
taking on the form of man and dwelling here 
on earth among men to accomplish a purpose 
— his resurrection and ascension to heaven, 
where he took his seat at the right hand of 
the Father. (The record fails to inform us 
how this fact was ascertained). None of 



THE CHURCH DEIFIES CHRIST. 73 

these tilings were entirely new. There had 
previously been several instances of miracu- 
lous conception — all the deities of the Greeks 
and Romans were but incarnated gods — the 
raising of the dead to life had been lately 
performed by Jesus and others ; the belief in 
the resurrection of the body had become an 
accepted doctrine with the pharisees, and was, 
of course, familiar to the minds of the people 
in general ; and ascension had been made 
familiar to the pagan mind by the case of 
Romulus and others ; while the Jews had the 
instances of Enoch and Elijah already cited. 
Add to all these considerations the fact that 
the followers of Jesus loved him with all 
their hearts and most deeply deplored his 
death. And again add, that the disciples 
intensely desired to know that their great 
leader still lived, and we will have all the 
conditions necessary in that age of unbounded 
credulity to insure the acceptance and so-called 
belief in all these incredible doctrines. 

So far this is but a sketch of what actually 
occurred — that the Jews actually crucified the 



74 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

Savior — that his friends believed he had risen 
from the grave and ascended to heaven — that 
the age is uncritical and credulous enough to 
believe anything however absurd, improbable, 
unreasonable or impossible. Out of these facts 
and conditions has been constructed a system 
of so-called Christian theology, which has in 
effect, if not in terms, completely set aside and 
annulled the way of salvation clearly taught by 
the Savior. We shall not go into any lengthy 
arguments to prove what everybody knows. 

L,et us see as briefly as possible, how this 
great change has been wrought — how Salva- 
tion by Grace and Faith has been substituted 
for Salvation as the reward of obedience to the 
law. 

PAUL THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES. 

It is Paul the converted Jew, the learned, 
acute and zealous apostle to the gentiles who 
is chiefly to be credited with the authorship of 
the new way of salvation. Paul was a learned 
Jew recently converted to Christianity. He 
tells us that: "After the most straitest sect 
of our religion I lived apharisee." (Acts 26:5). 



PAUL AND HIS RELIGION. 75 

He had spent much of his life in Jerusalem 
and had been ''taught according to the perfect 
manner of the law of the fathers at the feet of 
Gamaliel," the renowned doctor of the Jewish 
law in that period. (Acts 22: 3). We may rea- 
sonably suppose that a man whose mind was so 
fully and deeply impressed with the doctrines 
of the Jewish religion and customs, could not 
at once throw them all off and become a com- 
plete Christian in a day. Some remnants of his 
Jewish faith would naturally survive the con- 
version. And we are not without proof of this. 
For instance he performed the rite of circum- 
cision on Timotheus. (Acts 16: 3). And his 
remarks on circumcision in his epistles, show 
that he considered the doctrine not without 
favor. 

Paul's God, still retaining some traces of the 
characteristics of Moses' God, is quite unlike 
Jesus' Heavenly Father. 

The most pronounced of these survivals of 
Paul's former religious faith, is his retention of 
the doctrine of sacrifice as the means of aton- 
ing for the sins of the people. 



76 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

Jesus had said to the scribes: "To love God 
with all the heart . . . and to love one's neigh- 
bor as himself, is more than all whole burnt- 
offerings and sacrifices." (Mark 12: 33). Jesus 
had in fact, practically, though not in express 
terms, abolished by disuse the Mosaic law of 
sacrifice and had substituted for it the law of 
Love, Repentance and Forgiveness. 

Paul, on the contrary, teaches that the sacri- 
fices of the Mosaic law were types of better 
things to come. He reminds the Jews, to whom 
he is speaking, that: ' 'Almost all things are by 
the law purged with blood; and, without shed- 
ding of blood, is no remission." (Hebrews 9:22). 

Having discovered the doctrine of original 
sin, and seeing the whole world of mankind 
groaning under the helpless condemnation of 
that sin, Paul feels the necessity of finding an 
antidote for that great and terrible calamity. 
In such an exigency his thoughts naturally — 
we might almost say necessarily — recur to the 
Mosaic law of which he was a master. One 
error begets another. He had found original 
sin in the Mosaic writings ; he looks to the 



THE DOCTRINE OF SACRIFICES. 77 

same source for the remedy. Sins are atoned 
for and God's anger appeased by offerings and 
sacrifices. These offerings and sacrifices must 
needs be commensurate with the magnitude 
of the offense. But he found nowhere on the 
earth an offering adequate to the demand of 
this occasion. Accordingly the recent fact of 
the crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews is seized 
upon and construed into a holy sacrifice. 
Jesus, says Paul, had been offered by God 
himself as a sacrifice to take away the sins of 
the world. Theoretically, transgression of 
the law is sin, and sin provokes the anger and 
wrath of God which must be appeased by 
suitable offerings and sacrifices to be made by 
or for the transgressors. But in this extraor- 
dinary case, God himself initiates the pro- 
ceeding. And to appease his own anger, God, 
seeing the utter hopelessness of man under 
the condemnation of the law, determines, 
purely as an act of grace to send his only 
begotten Son to die the just for the unjust, 
and to bear the sins of the whole world and 
thus to reconcile God again to man. Still 



78 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

more. It is claimed that Christ the Son,, 
coequal and coeternal with the Father, con- 
curred and consented to this plan, and came 
voluntarily and offered himself a willing sacri- 
fice to suffer the infamous and painful death 
of the cross that he might relieve the world 
of mankind from the effect of that appalling 
calamity that had fallen upon them by reason 
of Adam's transgression of the law. Thus 
the most appalling crime in the whole history 
of man on the earth is converted into an act 
of the supremest merit. 

If this be true — if it be true that Christ 
came voluntarily, by the consent and counsel 
of God the Father, and offered himself a 
willing sacrifice to suffer and die upon the 
cross to redeem the human race from the 
judgment of condemnation resting upon them, 
and to thus appease God's anger — how utterly 
inconsistent it was in Jesus in the hour of 
his agony, to pray to God to "Let this cup 
pass." .(Luke 22: 42). To relieve him from 
this suffering, which, if God had listened to 
and granted his prayer, would have wholly 



The doctrine of sacrifices. 79 

defeated the entire scheme. In a mere man 
such a prayer would not have seemed unnat- 
ural. But, in the belief of the theologians, 
Christ was a divine being, the son and coequal 
of God the Father. Does it not incline one 
to believe that Christ was only a man ; and 
being only a man, he prayed to a higher 
power ? 

Jesus also prayed for his persecutors, even 
for them who were nailing him to the cross : 
"Father, forgive them, for they know not 
what they do." (Iyiike 23:34). Now, if it 
were true that Jesus was being voluntarily 
sacrificed as a propitiation for the sins of the 
world, and in pursuance of a determinate 
appointment of the Father and Son, as the 
foundation of a new scheme of salvation, then 
these men were simply executing God's will. 
What need, then, had they to be forgiven? 
But the fact that Christ prayed God to forgive 
them, proves that they were participants in a 
great crime and, therefore, had need to be 
forgiven. 

Jesus, as a fac% was accused, arrested, 



80 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

tried, condemned and crucified as a male- 
factor. If, as the orthodox claim, he was 
voluntarily offered by God's appointment as a 
holy sacrifice, what reason can be suggested, 
why he was not offered in due form on the 
altar by a priest as a sacrifice, and not on the 
cross as a criminal ? 

These several circumstances, all pointing 
one wa} T , indicate with great force that God 
had much less to do with this memorable act 
than the Jews had. 

Jesus, considered as a sacrifice, says Paul, 
bore away the sins of the world. This, again, 
is after the similitude of the old Mosaic law, 
the scape goat. 

"And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the 
head of the live goat, and confess over him all the in- 
iquities of the children of Israel, and all their trans- 
gressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head 
of the goat and shall send him away by the hand of a 
fit person to the wilderness; and the goat shall bear 
upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhab- 
ited." (Leviticus 16: 21, 22). 

For convenience, facility and economy, this 
plan of relieving a whole people of their sins 



SACRIFICES. 81 

by a single performance, can hardly be im- 
proved. Its efficiency is quite another matter. 
But if one smiles gently as he reads this 
grotesque method of purifying the morals of 
the people, ought he to be accused of irrever- 
ence ? A sensible person can only feel a sense 
of ridicule on reading such nonsense. 
But let us hear Paul : 

"But now once in the end of the world hath he ap- 
peared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. . . . 
So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many." 
(Hebrews 9:26, 28). 

It is the very idea of the goat bearing away 
the sins of the people. Christ puts away or 
bears off or away the sins of the people just 
as the goat did. Is not the absurdity and 
impossibility in the one case and the other the 
same? Do we not know that we cannot be 
rid of our sins in such a way ? Does not 
every man know that he must himself suffer 
the penalty of his sins and that there is no 
possibility of avoiding it ? I say it with all 
reverence, but the sacrifice of Christ is the old 
heathen idea in all its hideousness and full- 



82 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

ness. Christ undertook to teach the people 
how to avoid sin and how to be relieved of 
sin by repentance and forgiveness. He did 
not pretend to take any man's sins on himself. 
But, grant that the death of Christ was a 
sacrifice and not a murder. What then? 
What was a sacrifice at best ? What were all 
sacrifices in those times? Only an attempt 
to win the favor or to placate the anger of an 
offended deity. All the deities of those times 
— and especially Moses' God — are formed 
after the pattern of weak and passionate man. 
"For I the Lord God am a jealous God, " etc. 
They were, therefore, subject to violent fits of 
passion and rage. The priests taught the 
people that the only means of appeasing their 
anger or of insuring their favor, was to sacri- 
fice a goat, a ram, a bullock or a man as the 
case might be. This was perhaps the earliest 
form of religious worship among the heathen 
nations. This practice was nearly universal. 
The Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, 
Phoenicians, and Canaanites, as well as the 
Jews, all practiced this form of religion. 



WHAT JESUS TAUGHT. 83 

They knew of no more rational way of 
approaching the deity. Moses had specially 
provided this method as best adapted to the 
benighted throng which he led in the wilder- 
ness. The Canaanites, and so the others 
occasionally, offered human sacrifice, the 
most barbarous of all. But whether the 
victim offered were a goat or a bullock, a man 
or the Son of God, the sacrifice is in all cases 
alike, a heathen rite. The great names con- 
nected with it do not change the character of 
the rite itself. The religion of the sacrifice of 
bulls and goats has for its only basis a total 
misconception of the true character of God. 
Jesus, in his brief but glorious ministry, 
had taught and revealed to the world: "God 
is a spirit, and they who worship him, worship 
him in spirit." (John 4:24). He also taught 
that "Our Father which art in heaven" is not 
a God of jealousy, passion and violence, but 
a God of love, compassion and tender mercy 
for all his children, desiring the happiness and 
salvation of all, exacting from them no other 
worship but the love and filial reverence of 



-84 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

pure hearts which are to him far more accept- 
able worship than the sacrifice of bulls and 
goats. He had taught mankind that salvation 
is the final reward of obedience to the law of 
righteousness. This is what Christ had 
taught before Paul came on the stage. It was 
indeed a new regime — a revelation. And it 
is not too much to say that Paul never got up 
to this conception of God. His writings all 
show that he was never able wholly to cast 
off Judaism for Christianity. In point of 
fact, Paul was never converted to Christianity. 
He allied himself with the disciples of Christ, 
but he never embraced Jesus' doctrines. 

The date of Paul's conversion is generally 
supposed to have been somewhere from five to 
eight years after the death of Christ. Paul 
never saw Jesus and never heard his voice. He 
was zealously employed for a considerable time 
before his conversion in persecuting the Chris- 
tians. As none of the doings and teachings of 
the Savior had been reduced to writing until 
long after Paul's conversion, Paul's only means 



PAUL'S CONVERSION. 85 

of learning what Christ's religion really was, 
was by such vague and uncertain oral reports 
as happened to reach his ears. At the time, 
then, of his conversion, we may fairly conclude 
that Paul was thoroughly imbued with all the 
doctrines and precepts of the Jewish religion, 
and knew practically nothing of Christianity. 
His conversion imposed upon him one of the 
most difficult tasks which ever fall to the lot of 
man to perform — to change his religion. To 
discard the old and to adopt the new at the 
same time, involve a change of habit which 
can only take place slowly and with great 
effort and difficulty. Paul's success in accom- 
plishing this was no exception to the general 
rule. Proof of the fact that he never got rid of 
his old religious notions is in evidence against 
him on every page of his writings. Such ex- 
pressions as "wrath of God"; "What if God, 
willing to show his wrath, and to make his 
power known," etc., (Romans 9:22, 24), show 
this plainly. Negative evidences abound every- 
where. But the most conspicuous and con- 
clusive proof of Paul's tardy transition from 



86 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

Judaism to Christianity, is in the fact that he 
makes God sacrifice his own beloved Son to 
propitiate his wrath against the people on 
account of their sins, and to thus reconcile God 
again to the people. It seems incredible that 
Paul would have done this, if he had been cor- 
rectly informed of what Christ had taught; 
and we can only account for his partiality for 
Jewish practices by supposing him ignorant of 
the teachings of Christ. No act on his part 
could more clearly demonstrate that Paul is yet 
more an Israelite than a Christian; that he has 
not yet entirely cast off the influence- of his 
Mosaic teachings, and. that his mind is still 
more under the control of Jewish ideas than of 
the new regime. Paul's God is not the God 
of Jesus who has no altars of sacrifice and no 
sacrifices, but the God of Moses still demand- 
ing sacrifices to appease his anger. Instead of 
adopting Jesus' God of love, Paul adopted 
Moses' God of vengeance who delights in 
heathen sacrifices. 

Paul states his theory in these terms, 
"Asbyone man's disobedience many were made 



ORTHODOX FAITH. 87 

sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made 
righteous." (Rom. 5:19). 

Here we have the disease and the antidote. 
But it should be noted that the remedy, great 
as it is, is not completely adequate to the dis- 
ease. Adam's disobedience involved all; while 
Christ's sacrifice inures only to the benefit of 
a part of those who believe. (Rom. 3:22). 
"Being justified freely by his grace through 
the redemption that is in Christ Jesus; whom 
God hath set forth to be a propitiation, through 
faith, in his blood, to declare his righteousness 
for the remission of sins that are past." (Rom. 
3: 22, 25 ; see Hebrews, 9:15). 

But the sacrifice of Christ is only a part of 
Paul's scheme of salvation. The sacrifice 
of itself alone, saved no one. The sacrifice 
only prepared the conditions for salvation and 
thus made salvation possible to those who 
believe. The complementary part of the 
scheme is 

FAITH. 

"By grace are ye saved through faith ; and that not 
■of yourselves; it is the gift of God." (Eph. 2:8). 



88 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

This faith is of the most extraordinary- 
character. It is not the outcome of knowl- 
edge, of evidence, of confidence, and not a 
mental product in any sense. We will not 
attempt to describe it. Let Orthodoxy speak 
for itself in characterizing it. 

We quote from a late publication: "Nature 
and the Supernatural" by Rev. Horace Bush- 
nell, D. D., p. 379-80. 

' 'The doctrine of this salvation makes it a salvation 
by Faith; in which we have another ruling idea of the 
scheme that coincides with its supernatural facts and 
character, Christianity" (Paulisrn) "differs from all 
philosophies and ethical doctrines of men, in the fact 
that it rests all virtue in faith, exactly as it should, if 

it be a grace imported into nature from without 

Such a salvation lies not within the premises of nat- 
ural fact and reason; it is not therefore a matter of 
science, or of logical deduction. It makes its address, 

therefore, not to reason, hut to faith It 'cannot 

be received by reason The new salvation is by 

faith because it is a supernatural salvation." 

A supernatural religion, conferred by a 
supernatural means and in a supernatural 
way ; a religion which lies not within the cog- 



EJECTION — PREDESTINATION. 89 

nizance of Reason and which Reason cannot 
accept, because Reason cannot comprehend it, 
cannot measure or weigh it, cannot see its ex- 
cellences nor feel its power. Such a religion 
propounded to rational men to guide them 
in the way of truth! This faith is wholly 
unattainable to man by any act of his own. 
It is the gift of God and comes in no other 
way. For aught we know there may be 
many such gifts lying about us, which we 
have never been able to appropriate or make 
available for any useful human purpose. 

But this gift of faith is not for all. God 
bestows it only on whom he will — only on the 
elect of his grace. (Hebrews ix:i5). 

"Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have 
mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth." (Rom. 9:18). 
' 'And we know that all things work together for good 
to them that love God, to them iuIio are the called 
according to his purpose." (Rom. 8:28). "For whom 
he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be con- 
firmed to the image of his Son, that he might be the 
first born among many brethren. Moreover whom 
he did predestinate them he also called, and whom 
he called them he also jusified: and whom he justified 
them he also glorified." (Rom. 8:28, 30). 



90 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

We quote again frorn^the work of Bushnell 
page 237. 

"Do we then affirm, it will be asked, the absolute 
inability of a man to do and become what is right 
before God ? That is the Christian doctrine, and there 
is none more obviously true." 

Paul says: "Therefore we conclude that a man 
is justified by faith without the deeds of the law." 
(Rom. 3:28). 

Paul also concludes that "No flesh can be justified 
by the deeds of the law.'' (Galatians 2:16) . 

How this plan works. 

"Now to him that worketh, is the reward not 
reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that 
worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the 
ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." 
(Rom. 4:4,5). 

Thus is man completely prostrated, and 
ever\* incentive to relieve himself by appeal- 
ing to God for help is taken away. His final 
destiny has been predetermined thousands of 
years before he was born; and nothing he can 
do can change it. He can only await the 
destiny which an arbitrary Diet}' has decreed. 

We have said above that Paul's plan of sal- 



CHRISTIANITY AND PAUUSM CONTRASTED. 91 

vation is radically different from Jesus' way 
to the kingdom of heaven. This will become 
more obvious, perhaps, by contrasting the two 
plans, the one with the other, at a few points. 

( i ) Jesus taught that the way to eternal 
life is by obedience to the law, by doing the will 
of God, by good works, deeds of benevolence 
and kindness one to another among men. 

Paul says No: Salvation is "Not of works 
lest any man should boast." (Ephesians 2:8). 

"Therefore by the deeds of the law there 
shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by 
the law is the knowledge of sin." (Rom. 3:20). 

(2) Jesus taught that the way to be rid of 
our sins, is to repent of our evil deeds and 
seek God's forgiveness. Repentance true and 
heartfelt is of the very first importance. There 
can be no pardon without repentance. 

Paul says No: ' 'The gifts and callings of God 
are without repentance. ' ' (Rom. 1 1 : 29) . 

"By grace are ye saved, through faith and 
that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God." 
(Ephesians 2:8). 



A 



92 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

"Therefore we conclude that a man is justi- 
fied by faith without the deeds of the law." 
(Rom. 3:28). 

(3) Jesus teaches us: That God neither 
desires nor requires of us any other than spir- 
itual worship. To love God and one's neigh- 
bor is better than sacrifices. He virtually 
repudiates sacrifices of any kind, and especially 
human sacrifices. (Mark 12:33). 

Paul on the contrary, sacrifices Jesus him- 
self to propitiate God's anger. (Rom. 3:25); 
and even makes God sanction this sacrifice as 
his own act. "Without shedding of blood is 
no remission." (Hebrews 9:22). 

(4) Jesus' way of salvation is equally open 
and free to all alike. The most sinful, by true 
repentance, may find pardon. 

Paul teaches us that none can be saved but 
those whom God has preordained to eternal life 
from the foundation of the world; and to whom 
he gives the special grace of faith. (Hebrews 

9: 15). 

(5) Jesus' plan of salvation in all its parts, 
is natural, simple and comprehensible to the 



CHRISTIANITY AND PAUUSM CONTRASTED. 93 

human understanding. It places man in com- 
plete harmony with his Creator and with his 
fellow-beings, puts him on the line of moral 
and intellectual growth and advance, surrounds 
him with conditions stimulating him to deeds 
of virtue and holds out to him the highest 
possible incentive to exert all his faculties and 
to improve all his opportunities to lift himself 
to a higher plane and thus get nearer to God. 
Paul's plan on the contrary, is in all its parts 
supernatural and, as it appears to me, purely 
artificial. Examine as we may all the chief 
features, singly or collectively, we will find 
nothing that tends to harmonize man's relation 
with his Creator, nor with his fellow-beings. 
Nor is there in it all anything to stimulate 
man's moral virtues and cause him to aspire and 
strive for a higher plane of spiritual life. It 
offers man no incentive to be good or to do 
good. It teaches no morals, nor is it founded 
on any recognized moral principle that can to- 
day be accepted as such. Whoever looks into 
it and examines its cardinal features one by one, 
original sin, the election of God's grace, the 



91 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

sacrifice of Christ as an offering to appease 
God's displeasure, faith as the gift of God 
regardless of the merits of the recipient, the 
doctrine of imputed righteousness — the merits 
of Jesus' sacrifice imputed to the salvation of 
unrepentant sinners — I say whoever looks into 
these doctrines, will find only an artificial and 
arbitrary, or mechanical sort of contrivance 
for saving a portion of the human family with- 
out the slightest reference to their deserts, while 
it leaves the remainder in hopeless condemna- 
tion to suffer eternally the penalty of an offense 
for which they are. in no possible sense respon- 
sible. A faith wholly unattainable by any 
efforts man may make for himself, and wholly 
beyond the cognizance of the human under- 
standing, is neither an element of spiritual 
growth nor of progress in the ways of civiliza- 
tion. Nor can such a faith subserve any inter- 
est of man in his present state of being. 

Such is an outline of Paul's plan of salvation, 
which has been accepted and preached by the 
orthodox churches of all Christendom for eigh- 
teen centuries. All this time they have called 



CHRISTIANITY AND PAULISM CONTRASTED. 95 

it and still call it Christianity. But is it not 
time to remove this mask ? No intelligent 
person should be longer deceived b}^ a trick 
so transparent. Paul's way of salvation is as 
widely different from that of Jesus as it is from 
Hinduism. 

Paul's way of salvation is wholly outside of 
the law and beyond the scope of reason. It 
rests for its sole foundation on the dogma of 
original sin. Jesus destroyed that foundation, 
(if such a doctrine ever existed outside of 
Paul's brain) when he said: "Suffer little 
children to come unto me ... for of such is 
the kingdom of heaven." Surely if little chil- 
dren are fit subjects for the kingdom of heaven, 
then they are not born under condemnation for 
Adam's sin. But this doctrine of original sin 
which never had any substantial foundation, 
being now disclaimed and rejected as it gener- 
ally is even by the clergy themselves, the 
raison d' etre of Paul's system is totally 
wanting and the whole structure falls to the 
ground. 



96 CHRISTIAXITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

The doctrine of Salvation by Grace is 
nowhere mooted, mentioned or alluded to in 
any of the four Gospels. That doctrine was 
developed by others who came after Christ. 
The word Grace, even, is nowhere used in 
the first three Gospels, and in the fourth only 
in the author's preface, as the language of 
the author and not of the Savior. Both these 
doctrines — Original Sin and Salvation by 
Grace are apparently wholly foreign to the 
religion which Christ taught to his disciples, 
and were manifestly unknown to him. 

A single text deserves to be noticed in this 
connection. By way of an illustration and 
incidentally Christ says : "He came to give 
his life a ransom for many." 

This expression has been forced into service 
as evidence that the Savior himself recognized 
as a fact that he was a chief factor in the 
scheme of Salvation by Grace, and that he 
thus sanctioned the correctness and truth of 
that doctrine. The language used, when 
properly interpreted, will not bear the con- 
struction thus placed upon it. 



A TEXT INTERPRETED. 97 

(i) The fundamental rule for the inter- 
pretation and construction of language is to 
refer it to the subject matter in reference to 
which it was uttered. We may fairly assume 
that the language made use of by a speaker 
has reference to the subject under considera- 
tion, and that the significance and purport of 
the language used is limited to that subject. 
The one explains and defines the other. 
What was the subject on which the language 
in question was uttered ? Two of the disci- 
ples, the two sons of Zebidee, aided by their 
mother, had privately attempted to get from 
the Master a pledge of unfair preference 
over their fellow disciples when they should 
come into the kingdom of heaven. "And 
when the ten heard it they were moved with 
indignation against the two brethren." It 
may be easily imagined that such an eruption 
breaking out among the Twelve, would at 
once command the attention of the Master. 
"Jesus called them unto him." He sees that 
they — even his chosen Twelve — have signally 
failed to comprehend the spirit of his teaching, 



98 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THKOLOGY. 

and makes the incident the occasion of an 
additional, special lecture on humihty — a 
special effort to disabuse their minds of false 
preconceptions and to enlighten their under- 
standing as to the true conditions of the 
kingdom of heaven. Calling their attention 
to the well known fact that among the Gen- 
tiles, the Princes, the great, exercise dominion 
over their fellows, he tells them, by way of 
contrast, "It shall not be so among 3-ou." 
Among you — that is to sa} 7 in the kingdom of 
heaven of which you constitute the nucleus — 
there will be no priority of rank, no grades 
of merit, but all will be on an equal footing. 
The vain honors so much coveted and so 
eagerly sought after here in this world will 
have no place there. There will be no desire 
to rule one over another. The best and the 
greatest, if there be any such, will be servants 
to the poorest and least. Each will be the 
willing servant of all. The Savior was lectur- 
ing the disciples specially on the subject of 
humility and tells them in terms that the 
greatest should be willing to serve the least; 



A TEXT INTERPRETED. 9$ 

and to emphasize his teaching, he cites his 
own example to illustrate in what manner 
and to what extent we should be willing to 
serve each other : ' 'Even as the Son came 
not to be ministered unto, but to minister 
and to give his life a ransom for many." 
(Matt. 20:28). The theme, the one thought 
which was wholly occupying his mind, was 
that of Christian love, fellowship and duty 
which mutually unite all in his kingdom. 
Nothing could be more apposite than his own 
example to illustrate the character of the 
kingdom of heaven and the plainest rules of 
construction limit the meaning of the lan- 
guage quoted to the case then in hand. 

(2) The expression under consideration 
was used only incidentally and subordinately 
as an illustration of the doctrine or thought 
which the speaker was laboring to impress 
upon his disciples, and not as a declarative 
statement of fact. It has not, therefore, the 
dignity or authority of an unqualified, inde- 
pendent declaration ; and without violence 
cannot be enlarged or distorted to embrace a 



100 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

meaning wholly outside of the subject in 
reference to which the language was uttered. 
(3) The declared mission of Christ was to 
"fulfill the law" — that is, to revive and 
reestablish the law, which had fallen into 
utter disuse among the Jews. He found the 
Jewish people in a state of profound sinful- 
ness, practicing a multitude of superstitious 
rites and ceremonies, and, by their traditions, 
"making the law of none effect." To use 
the strongly figurative language of the times 
Jesus found the Jewish people in the bonds 
of iniquity — the enslaved captives of sin. It 
is- in the line of his chosen work to rescue 
them from their bondage by teaching them to 
know what the law of righteousuess is and 
how to obey it, and that true and faithful 
obedience thereto is the only way to the 
kingdom of heaven. To teach them to forsake 
their sinful practices and to render cheerful 
obedience to the law, is, in the figurative 
sense of the text, to ransom them. To this 
work of reform Jesus (figuratively) gave his 
life — that is, the labor, effort, opportunities 



A TEXT INTERPRETED. 101 

and years of his life — life, by metonymy, for 
the work of his life. In this sense, truly, he 
gave his life a ransom for many — just as we 
say now-a-days, that a doctor gives his life to 
healing the sick; or a Christian minister gives 
his life to the work of saving souls. It is 
obviously in this figurative sense that the 
expression "to give his life a ransom for 
many," is to be interpreted. In this sense 
the illustration is strictly pertinent to the 
case in hand and seems to bear no other 
meaning. 

But, if it be said, that Christ literally gave 
his life a ransom for others, as the event 
afterwards proved, that fact proves nothing 
but the fact itself, and does not alter the 
case. It throws no light on the subject as 
to the motive of the sacrifice, in addition to 
what is reflected by the surroundings, and by 
that light we can only see that Christ having 
undertaken to reform the Jewish religion, 
had encountered in the Jewish rulers a cur- 
rent of opposition too strong to be controlled 
by him and to which he fell a sacrifice. 



102 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

Is it not therefore obvious that the text 
above quoted, cannot serve as a foundation 
for the doctrines that Jesus was sent into the 
world expressly to be crucified as an atone- 
ment for the sin of Adam ; or that he knew 
or believed himself sent for such purpose ? 

Are we not justified in asserting broadly 
that Jesus was sacrificed not as an atonement 
for the sins of Adam — not to satisfy the 
demands of the violated law — not to appease 
the wrath of the God of love — but simp^ as 
the victim of Jewish hate against one whom 
they regarded as an apostate? This may 
sound harsh and irreverent, but it seems to 
me so plain that I cannot forbear to write it. 

For a secondary basis, Paul, without the 
semblance of fact to justify such an assump- 
tion, but in the very teeth of numerous facts to 
the contrary, seizes upon that great crime — the 
crucifixion of Christ, and converts it into a holy 
sacrifice after the pattern of the Mosaic law. 
And, affecting to know all the counsels and 
the purposes of God, and, to clothe his doc- 
trines with necessary religious sanctions, Paul 



PAUUSM. 103 

makes God himself legitimate the whole 
scheme by ordering and decreeing the sacrifice 
of his beloved Son to appease his own anger, 
and thus to restore fallen man to his favor: all 
as a foundation for a new covenant, a new 
plan of salvation by grace and faith. On this 
foundation Paul builds up a system of his own 
with small reference to anything Christ has said 
or done. Paul puts forth his theories and as- 
sumptions with commanding ability and with 
unflinching boldness and confidence. His elo- 
quence, learning and zeal burned them into the 
conscience of a credulous age. 

But we should know that Paul's religion and 
Christ's religion are not one. These two 
systems, or plans of salvation are as widely 
asunder as the poles. They have no single ele- 
ment in common. Paul's religion directly 
negates, in fact theoretically abolishes, Christ's 
plan of salvation. But it fell out that Paul's 
plan was adopted and practiced, and that 
Christ's plan has remained in abeyance. The 
Pauline plan — involving as it does the funda- 
mental doctrines of original sin and atoning 



104 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOEOGY. 

sacrifice of Jesus — both survivals of the heathen 
rites and notions of the Mosaic age — the divin- 
ity of Christ's nature, his co-eternity with the 
Father, his voluntary incarnation, miraculous 
birth, crucifixion and resurrection, vicarious 
atonement, imputed righteousness and salvation 
by faith — has involved the Christian world in 
a turmoil of angry passions that lasted through 
1 8 centuries. That system of theology has been 
an absolute barrier to anything like Christian 
unity. The impossibility of believing doc- 
trines so extraordinary has divided the Chris- 
tian world into hostile factions warring one on 
another, and often throwing whole communi- 
ties into bloody disorder and even states and 
nations inco war. Thousands of volumes have 
been written to rationalize these doctrines, and 
yet they are as much disputed as ever; nor are 
factious divisions among Christians diminished. 
The Pauline or orthodox scheme of salvation 
has the prescription of time in its favor. It 
stands before the world apparently clothed in 
the majesty and armed with the sanction of God 
and the Eternal Son. It places the world of 



PAUI.ISM. 105 

sinful mortals prostrate at its feet, condemned 
and helpless. It is also fortified in many times 
ten thousand costly temples erected and dedi- 
cated to the worship of the most high God; and 
is supported by the prayers, devotions and ob- 
lations of millions of devout worshipers who 
bow in awe at its altars. From this intrenched 
fortress the orthodox clergy of today are still 
fulminating the terrors of hell and eternal 
perdition, as they did a thousand years ago, 
against all who refuse to accept and believe 
(or pretend to believe) their impossible doc- 
trines. And with all, the cause of religion 
progresses but little. 

The trouble is not that men in general, are 
less godly or religious than they were in the 
earlier times of the Christian era, but are 
more intelligent and, therefore, less credulous 
and superstitious. The theologians of those 
early days of our era made a mistake. From 
accident or design, they preferred Paul's plan 
of salvation to that of Christ. The intelligence 
of the nineteenth century has outgrown Paul's 
system of salvation by faith, election and 



106 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

imputed righteousness. That scheme requires 
one to believe too many things which are 
utterly incomprehensible and apparently 
impossible to believe or accept as true. We 
need less of dogma and theology and more 
religion. Would it not be better to drop 
Paulism and try Christianity ? 






CONSTANTINE. 107 



CHAPTER III. 



constantine and the church— the reign 
of Faith without Reason —Demoraliza- 
tion and Degeneracy of the Church. 

It was in the forests of Britain, in the year of 
our Lord 306, that the Roman legions pro- 
claimed Constantine emperor of Rome. Con- 
stantine was at that time about 33 years of age. 
He had been born and bred in the military ser- 
vice and knew but little else. But in this he 
had already displayed his great ability as a 
commander in many bloody wars, and had won 
for himself a great name. He had need of all 
his military genius to make good the choice of 
his troops and to hold the rank their partiality 
had assigned to him. The empire was in the 
throes of dissolution. It had long been divided 
into the Eastern Empire and the Western. 
Galienus, an active and able leader, was the 
ruler of the Eastern Empire and was the de- 
clared foe of Constantine whom he undertook 



108 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

to supplant by appointing a favorite of his own 
to rule in the West. In all, Constantine's com- 
petitors for the throne of the Western Empire 
embracing Britain, Gaul, Spain and Italy, were 
not less than four or five. Amid such dangers 
and difficulties, he felt that, if he would live, 
he must reign. Force was the only law known 
to princes in those times. At the end of 
eighteen years of bloody civil wars, his com- 
petitors and opponents, one by one, had all 
been overcome, vanquished or destroyed, and 
Constantine was sole emperor of the united 
Empire. In this mighty struggle he had 
endured great labor, incurred many and 
great dangers, and had committed great 
crimes. He had reached the goal of his 
ambition — an ambition not unworthy of the 
greatest and best of men when worthily pur- 
sued. How Constantine won this proud station 
may be told in a few words. Says a writer in 
the American Cyclopedia, Vol. V, page 271: 

"It is in vain that zealous writers have tried to 
relieve Constantine's reputation from the crimes com- 
mitted to satisfy his ambition. His father-in-law, 



CONSTANTINO CONVERTED. 109 

Maximain, formerly emperor of the West, his brother- 
in-law, Licinius; his own son Crisp us; his nephew, a 
son of Licinius a boy of only eleven years; and lastly 
his wife Fausta, were his victims. ' ' 

During the preceding centuries since Jesus 
ended his ministry the Christian Church, 
though under the frown of public authority, in 
its orderly though not wholly unpretentious 
way, had been increasing its numbers, expand- 
ing its power, perfecting its organization and 
extending its dominion from year to year in 
spite of persecutions and minor oppositions, till 
it was known in every city all around the Med- 
iterranean, in Asia Minor and in all of southern 
Europe. Constantine was not only a great 
soldier, he was also a consummate politician 
and statesman. Having vanquished his com- 
petitors and won his title and possession of the 
throne, he felt the importance of consolidating 
and insuring his power for the future. In this 
view he saw nothing else so promising as the 
adoption of the Christian Church. Paganism 
had, up to that time, been the religion of the 
Roman people. But Paganism had from the 



110 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

beginning been without any principle of 
vitality, and was now become effete and was 
no longer of service as an element of strength 
to the civil goverment. On the other hand he 
saw that the Christian Church was an active, 
strongly organized, vital force, animated b\- an 
unconquerable principle of aggression, which 
it was far better to have as an ally than as a 
foe. He therefore threw his protecting shield 
over the church as a whole, and thus uniting 
Church and state, he took the Church into the 
partnership as a branch of civil government. 
Leaving out the supernatural concomitants, 
this is what has been called the conversion of 
Constantine. His action in the whole affair 
was obviously dictated b} T his political policy. 
Constantine was converted 'to the belief, that the 
orthodox Church was a more active and a far 
stronger national element than Paganism could 
ever be, and that it was true statesmanship on 
his part, to swap off the one for the other. 
That this was the true character and extent of 
his conversion is obvious from his continued 
indulgence to the Pagans, his unscrupulous 



SCHISMS IN THE CHURCH. Ill 

character and especially from the fact that he 
was not baptized and received into the com- 
munion of the Church until the last hour of his 
life. Constantine adopted the Church not to 
protect the Christians but to secure the aid of 
the Christians to protect himself, not to pro- 
mote Christianity as a great religious insti- 
tution, but, to subserve the purposes of his 
ambition. 

The entire Church, East and West, having 
embraced the teachings of Paul concerning the 
nature and character of Christ — his divinity, 
his co-eternity and co-equality with God the 
Father, his incarnation and sacrifice to atone 
for the sins of the whole world, his resurrection 
and ascension, and particularly the dogma of 
original sin imputed to the entire human race, 
and that salvation is by God's grace and by 
the gift of Faith only, together with the 
trinity of the God-head — the Church having 
adopted all these as fundamental doctrines, as 
might naturally be expected, many fierce dis- 
putes, jarring discords, quarrels, contentions 
and schisms arose in the bosom of the Church 



112 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

itself. Indeed so numerous and so violent have 
been these disturbances all the way along its 
course from the days of Paul until this time, 
that a complete account of them all would con- 
stitute a complete history of the Church. We 
will briefly give a sample or two to illustrate 
the character of these quarrels. As an in- 
stance of reasonable teaching in opposition to 
the orthodox doctrines of the Church, we cite 
the case of Pelagius. We give it in the 
language of a highly approved author John 
William Draper, in his "Intellectual Develop- 
ment of Europe," page 217. 

"Pelagius was a British monk, who, about the year 
.400 A. D. passed through Western Europe and North- 
ern Africa, teaching the doctrines that Adam was by 
nature mortal, and that, if he had not sinned, he 
nevertheless would have died; that the consequences 
of his sin were confined to himself, and did not affect 
his posterity; that new born infants are in the same 
condition as Adam before his fall ; that we are at birth 
as pure as he was ; that we sin by our own free will, 
and in the same manner may reform, and thereby 
work out our own salvation; that the grace of God is 
given according to our merits. He was repelled from 



SCHISMS IN THE; CHURCH. 113 

Africa by the influence of St. Augustine, and denoun- 
ced in Palestine from the cell of Jerome. He specially 
insisted on this, that it is not the mere act of baptiz- 
ing by water that washes away sin, but that it can 
only be removed by good works. Infants are bap- 
tized before it is possible that they could have sinned. 
On the contran^, Augustine resisted these doctrines, 
resting himself on the words of Scripture that bap- 
tism is for the remission of sins. The case of children 
compelled that father to introduce the doctrine of 
original sin as derived from Adam, notwithstanding 
the dreadful consequences if they die unbaptized. In 
like manner also followed the doctrines of predestina- 
tion, grace, atonement. 

"Summoned before a synod at Diospolis Pelagius was 
unexpectedly acquitted of heresy, an extraordinary 
decision, which brought Africa and the East into con- 
flict. Under these circumstances, perhaps without 
a clear foresight of the issue, the matter was referred 
to Rome as an arbiter or judge. 

"In his decision, Innocent I, magnifying the dig- 
nity of the Roman see and the advantage of such a 
supreme tribunal, determined in favor of the African 
bishops. But scarcely had he done this when he died 
and his successor, Zosimus, annulled his judgment, 
and declared the opinions of Pelagius to be orthodox. 
Carthage now put herself in an attitude of resistance. 
There was danger of a metaphysical or, theological 



114: CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOEOGY. 

Punic war. Meantime the wily Africans quietly 
procured from the emperor an edict denouncing 
Pelagius as a heretic. Through the influence of 
Count Valerius the faith of Europe was settled; the 
heresiarchs and their accomplices were condemned to 
exile and forfeiture of their estates; the contested doc- 
trine that Adam was created without any liability to 
death was established by law: to deny it was a state 
crime." 

This was apparently an honest effort, by a 
capable man, to reform and rationalize the 
doctrines of the Church and to make them 
more comprehensible and acceptable to the 
ordinary understanding. But that was pre- 
cisely what the clergy did not want. When 
Moses went up into the Mount to commune 
with God and to receive the law from him, he 
took great pains to make sure that none should 
follow him. He would have no witness of 
what he did to dispute the truth of his asser- 
tions. So the priesthood of the early cen- 
turies of our era assumed a lofty eminence, 
very near to God, immeasurably above the 
ignorant, common horde, nor do they ever 
relax their watchful care to preserve intact and 



ARROGANCE OF THE CHURCH. 115 

undiminished the space which separates them 
from the rabble at the base. From this imperial 
eminence they look down on the degraded 
masses and say to them : We are God' s chosen 
and anointed priests, appointed by him ex- 
pressly to communicate, interpret and execute 
his will among men. We live in constant 
communion with God and know intimately his 
will and all his purposes towards mankind. We 
are the only intermediary between }^ou and 
God. You are all sinners. You were all born 
already condemned to eternal woe by reason of 
Adam's transgression. 

Paul tells you: "Great is the mystery of 
godliness." (Timothy 3: 16). God, in his 
mysterious providence and as an act of grace has 
provided a way for your escape from that ter- 
rible punishment, if 3^ou will only do wdiat I 
tell you. It is only to God's chosen priests 
that these great mysteries are revealed. You 
cannot know them. They are beyond your 
comprehension ; and you are not expected or 
required to know them. You only need to 
know what the priest tells you. He will im- 



116 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

part to you all that you need to know for your 
salvation. It is only by and through the 
Church — through the intermediation of God's 
chosen and anointed priests — that you can 
obtain the benefits of this great mercy. Come 
into the Church and obey the priest's instruc- 
tions and you will be saved. 

That one of the many quarrels which most 
divided and disturbed the peace of the Church 
during the reign of Constantine, was what has 
been and is still known as Arianism. Arius 
denied the co-eternity of Christ as well as his 
co-equality with the Father, and claimed for 
Christ a personality distinct from that of the 
Father. Such doctrines were destructive of 
the equality of the persons composing the 
Trinity, and raised at once the most violent 
opposition. Riots, murders and other out- 
rages ensued. To quell the storm and to fix 
determinately the faith of the Church, Con- 
stantine called a great council of the Church 
to meet at Nicea in Asia Minor, in the year 
A. D. 325. That council was composed of 
three hundred and eighteen bishops, which 



THIS NICKXii CREED. 117 

number gives no mean idea of the magnitude 
of that mighty organization at that time. 
The grand deliverance of this council, presided 
over by the emperor in person, was what has 
ever since been known as the ' 'Nicene Creed. ' ' 
We here copy this celebrated document in its 
original form as given in a recent publication, 
(The P A ootprints of a Soul, by Reverend 
Henry Truro Bray, M. A., B. D., L. I/. D.) 

THE NICENE CREED. 

I believe in one God the Father Almight}^, Maker 
of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and 
invisible : and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only 
begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before 
all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of 
very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance 
with the Father ; by whom all things were made, who 
for us men, and for our salvation, came down from 
heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the 
Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified 
also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was 
buried, and the third day he rose again according to 
the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth 
on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come 
again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead. 

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and 



118 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and 
the Son, who with the Father and the Son together 
is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the 
prophets. And I believe in one Catholic and Apos- 
tolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the 
remission of sins, and I look for the resurrection of 
the dead, and the life of the world to come. 

Let us hear Dr. Bray's criticisms as to the 
manner of procuring this result of that cele- 
brated council. We quote from the work men- 
tioned, page 399. 

1 'When we come to the examination of the Nicene 
Creed, the great symbol of orthodoxy, we find that 
only the first clause, which refers exclusively to God 
the Father, has ever received, or does receive univer- 
sal assent. It will be admitted that if the balance of 
this creed be believed at all, it must be by Christians 
exclusively. A slight examination of the origin and 
growth of this creed, will better enable us to under- 
stand its value as a symbol of faith. 

"The original Nicene Creed was formulated at Nice, 
A. D. 325, by three hundred and eighteen bishops 
convened at the summons of the Emperor Constan- 
tine. In this council there were not less than three 
antagonistic parties — the homoousian, the homoiou- 
sian, and the Origenian. The homoousian, which 
today represents the orthodox party, in this council 



THE NICENE CREED. 119 

was in a decided minority. The majority of the 
bishops headed by Eusebius of Caesarea, followed 
the lead of Origen who represented the liberal party, 
while not a few were homoiousians, or followers of 
Arms, who represented the more radical party. The 
result of this council was a victory for the homoou- 
sians. This victory was brought about through the 
influence of the presiding emperor, the oratory of 
Athanasius, and the fear, on the part of many, of 
deposition, or of giving offence to the emperor. Only 
three were brave enough to refuse subscription to this 
creed of Nice — Arius, Theonas, and Secundus; and 
these, for their refusal, were exiled into Illyria. 

"Thus the Niceue Creed is a child of force, political 
influence, and oratorical persuasion." 

Draper, quoted above, on page 222 has some 
remarks touching trie value (or worthlessness) 
of councils as a means of ascertaining truth. 

"In these contests of Rome, Constantinople, and 
Alexandria for supremacy — for, after all, they were 
nothing more than the rivalries of ambitious place- 
men for power — the Roman bishop uniformly came 
forth the gainer. And it is to be remarked that he 
deserved to be so: his course was always dignified, 
often noble; theirs exhibited a reckless scramble for 
influence, an unscrupulous resort to bribery, court 
intrigue, murder." .... 



120 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

"Notwithstanding the contradictions and opposi- 
tion they (the councils) frequently exhibit, there may 
be discerned in the decisions of these bodies the traces 
of an affiliation indicating the continuous progression 
of thought. Thus, of the four oecumemical councils 
that were concerned with the facts spoken of in the 
preceding pages, that of Nicea determined the Son to 
be of the same substance with the Father; that of Con- 
stantinople, that the Son and Holy Spirit are equal to 
the Father; that of Bphesus, that the two natures of 
Christ make but one person ; and that of Chalcedon, 
that these natures remain two, notwithstanding their 
personal union. But that they failed of their object 
in constituting a criterion of truth is plainly demon- 
strated by such simple facts as that, in the fourth 
century alone, there were thirteen councils adverse to 
Arius, fifteen in his favor, and seventeen for the semi- 
Arians — in all, forty-five. From such a confusion, it 
was necessary that the councils themselves must be 
subordinate to a higher authority — a higher criterion 
able to give to them or refuse to them authenticity. 
That the source of pow T er, both for the council in the 
Fast and the papacy in the West, was altogether 
political, is proved by almost every transaction in 
which they were concerned." 

From this it appears that Constantine per- 
sonally had much to do in securing the adop- 



PAUUSM. 121 

tion of the Nicene Creed, which was a triumph 
for the Pauline system of salvation in the place 
and stead of Christ's plan. 

Whatever may be said of the councils, of the 
reckless and dissolute character of many of 
their constituents, of the base intrigues and 
low tricks often employed to influence their 
action and to secure a partisan result, of their 
errors of judgment and of the obvious unrelia- 
bility and worthlessness of their decrees as 
criteria of truth — we pass all these to notice 
only that the creed is the embodiment of Paul's 
teachings and plan of salvation pure and 
simple. That plan of salvation as interpreted 
and preached by all the orthodox clergy from 
the time of Paul to this day is essentially this: 
Every human being is born into the world 
already condemned to eternal woe by reason of 
Adam's transgression, which is imputed to all 
his race. To relieve mankind from a doom so 
terrible and so universal, a tremendous sacri- 
fice was demanded to appease God's anger and 
to place him at one again with the human 
family and thus make it possible for some of 



122 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

them to be saved. To meet the demands of 
so great an exigenc} r , God purely as an act of 
grace on his part, takes the matter into his own 
hands and sends his own beloved and onry son 
into the world expressly to be sacrificed for the 
sins of the people and thus provide a means or 
way of salvation for all such as believe on the 
truth and efncac3^ of this plan. It is only by 
and through the merits of this sacrifice (im- 
puted to only such as shall be saved) that any 
can be saved. And only those can be saved 
even bj^ this sacrifice, on whom, as an addi- 
tional act of grace, God specially bestows the 
miraculous gift of Faith, — which no man can 
acquire for himself b}^ any means in his power. 
It is bestowed only on the elect. 

These are the fundamentals. Other doc- 
trines — the trinity of the God- Head, the 
immaculate conception, papal infallibility , the 
Resurrection, transubstantiation, purgatory 
and others were added at one time or another 
as the occasion seemed to suggest. 

And this is what has passed all these 
centuries as Christianity, or the Christian 



PAUUSM NOT CHRISTIANITY. 123 

religion. But to call this Christianity is a 
hideous misnomer. It is not Christ's plan of 
salvation, or the religion which Christ taught, 
but is as unlike it as any two plans can well be. 
There is not a single element or feature in 
common between Christianity and Paulism. 
Christianity is natural, simple, reasonable and 
in the highest degree satisfying to the human 
soul. Paulism, which has become the creed 
of the orthodox church, is from first to -last a 
S3^stem of incomprehensible mysteries. The 
more we attempt to comprehend and ana^ze 
the more the mysteries multiply and the diffi- 
culties increase. The acutest inspection of 
that system will fail to discover in it a single 
element in itself calculated to comfort the soul 
of man or to promote his intellectual well- 
being. Christianity is the confident repose of 
the soul on God's loving kindness and tender 
mercies toward all His creatures and on His 
willingness and ever readiness to freely pardon 
the sins of all who sincerely repent. On the 
other hand Paulism, at best, has nothing better 
to offer man than a questionable hope alter- 



124 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

nating with a lurking fear lest, at last, he may 
not be one of the elect, — of which he can never 
be certain till death reveals his lot. 

The influence of Constantine's action in 
adopting the Christian Church made itself felt 
quite as extensively in other respects, as it did 
in the adoption of a creed. The result of this 
celebrated act so benevolent in external appear- 
ance, and so selfish and baneful in fact, was the 
weakening, disintegration and pollution of the 
church itself. Sheltered b}^ the protecting care 
of the civil power, the Christians no longer felt 
the necessity for that sharp and constant cir- 
cumspection in their daily walk and conver- 
sation, which had so preeminently distin- 
guished them in the apostolic times and had so 
greatly won upon the admiration and esteem 
of the Pagan tribes around them. They felt 
that, in so far as this world is concerned, the 
battle was over, — their cause was won and that 
they might lay off their armor. Their exer- 
tions relaxed, their zeal cooled. The alliance 
of the Christians with the state weakened the 
spirituality of the church and corrupted its 



DEGENERACY OF THE CHURCH. 125 

members by contact with political elements. 
The adoption of the church as the religion of 
the state practically superseded paganism. 
But Constantine did not wholly withdraw his 
protecting care from the pagans; who were 
permitted to still continue the practice of their 
worship more or less openly and publicly. It 
was not till the time of Theodosius, some fifty 
or more years after Constantine, that paganism 
was finally destroyed. The conversion of the 
emperor, while, in the loose ideas of those times 
it did not change the religion of the pagans, 
nevertheless had the effect indirectly to place 
them under the care of the church. This vast 
mass of pagan idolators, thus brought under 
the care of the church at one time, was far in 

excess of the true believers and was far too 

• 

great to be absorbed by the Christian element. 
The consequence of this was the paganization 
of Christianity. The alliance arrested the 
otherwise onward march of Christianity, adul-. 
terated and absorbed it for the time being. 
This result, of course, did not take place all 
at once. But the process began at once and 



126 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

continued progressively until there was little 
left in the church to remind one of the purity 
of former times. 

How this great calamity came about, the 
pages of history fully instruct us. The great 
Roman Empire, that had so long dominated 
the European world, was already in a state of 
visible decay and dissolution. Its organic 
force was wasted and there remained to it only 
the weakness and helplessness of a lingering 
old age. Paganism, too, which had never 
been anything but a nominal system of forms 
and ceremonies invented and supported by the 
State to divert and amuse the rabble, and 
which had long ceased to command the respect 
of any but the ignorant multitude, had become 
effete and had practically ceased to be either 
a religion, an entertainment for the multitude, 
or an efficient element in politics. When the 
aid of the political power was withdrawn from 
its support, paganism was simply an unor- 
ganized mass of idolaters. The Church, on 
the other hand, was young and fresh, mighty 
in numbers and talent, but recently organized 



AMBITION OF THE CHURCH. 127 

and full of vigor and daring, and, above all, 
animated and impelled, nominally at least, by 
the loftiest and mightiest motive that can 
actuate the human soul. 

The prelates of the church saw their oppor- 
tunity and showed neither tardiness nor reluc- 
tance to embrace it. In his action respecting' 
the church, it had been the aim of Constan- 
tine to make theology a branch of politics. It 
now became the ambition of the clergy to 
make politics a branch of theology. Their 
scheme from the first, as we may judge from 
their acts and from subsequent developments 
was to found, on the basis of ignorance and 
fear, a universal empire, to absorb into the 
church all authority spiritual and political. 
They had well defined ideas of what they 
would do; and no set of men ever more wisely 
adapted means to an end. 

The priests ostentatiously and unblushingly 
announced themselves to be the vicegerents of 
God to do his will among men on the earth ; 
to deliver, interpret and execute the mandates 
of the Almighty to and among men. God's 



128 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOEOGY. 

anointed priests are the only intermediates 
between Him and his fallen people. They are 
the instruments and only interpreters of God's 
will toward mankind; and that what they 
communicate to the people as the will and 
word of God must, at the peril of their soul's 
salvation, be accepted and believed by them, 
revered, honored and obeyed without the 
slightest mental qualification, reservation or 
"doubt, as the word and will of the Almighty 
himself. In short the pope and his bishops 
assumed very liberally of the divine character 
and attributes and took exclusive control of 
all religious matters for every soul in all 
Christendom. They not onh- speak and teach 
authoritatively in the name of God; they also 
perform miracles in his name. They heal 
the sick, cast out devils and do many other 
wonderful works. Miracles in those times 
abounded on all hands. The profound ignor- 
ance of the masses and their wonder-loving 
afforded a rich soil for that kind of product. 
Nothing was too extravagant, improbable, or 
absurd for their appetites; which the priests 



SUPPRESSION OF PROFANE LITERATURE. 129 

never failed to feed even to gluttony. The 
pagans had been accustomed to obey leaders 
who claimed their descent from the gods. 
They were, therefore, not wholly unprepared 
to hear and accept such pretensions. 

The first active step of the church in the 
^execution of their plan, was the suppression 
of profane literature in which the Emperor co- 
operated. The circumstances of the times 
greatly favored the clergy. Their purpose, 
as we have already stated, was to build a great 
empire on the basis of ignorance, superstition 
and fear. Their conduct corresponded to their 
motives. The general ignorance prevailing 
throughout the Roman Empire, in the fourth 
century of our era, was abundantly sufficient 
even to satisfy the requirements of the Romish 
Church. The masses were ignorant and 
credulous enough to "believe all that the priests 
told them however improbable and absurd it 
might be. It was therefore only necessary 
to keep them in that compliant condition. 
Knowing that it was easier to delude the 
ignorant than to convince the wise, they pro- 



130 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

ceeded to proscribe all profane literature then 
extant, and to destroy it. This was probably 
not difficult to accomplish. The clergy were 
alread}^ themselves the custodians of nearly all 
the books extant. It was a rare thing to find 
a la} T man that could write or read. In that 
age when books could only be multiplied by 
the slow process of the pen, literature was 
scant and books necessarily expensive and 
very scarce. The possession of a book by a 
man not in the ranks of the clergy, would 
be a thing of great notoriety. 

And so the work proceeds. The priests tell 
the people that the Bible and the Fathers con- 
tain all that they need to know and that all 
else is heretical and destructive of man's spiri- 
tual welfare and must be suppressed and 
destroyed. All works of secular learning were 
diligently sought out and committed to the 
flames. The great library at Alexandria, no 
doubt the largest and richest treasure then in 
the world, went up in smoke and flame. And 
so the destruction continued until the lights 
that had been kindled by previous generations 



THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT. 131 

are all extinguished, and intellectual night 
settled upon all the Christian world to last for 
a thousand years, to last till the light of science 
should again be kindled to expel the darkness 
of ecclesiasticism and bring a new day. The 
church was triumphant. Medieval faith was 
enthroned as the cardinal principle of religion. 
Intellectual freedom was suppressed, blotted 
out. The religion of faith had begun its reign. 

In connection with the suppression of profane 
learning, it is important to notice one histor- 
ical fact which seems to be of the very highest 
importance as affecting the integrity of the 
scriptures of the New Testament. I refer to 
the fact that no original manuscript of the New 
Testament, nor any copy of an earlier date than 
that age of Constantine, has been known to 
exist since that period. 

Many of these, no doubt, perished in the 
Decian persecution. But it had been full 
seventy-five years since then to the crusade 
against profane literature in the reign of Con- 
stantine. Nothing in this interval accounts 
for the destruction of scriptures remaining after 



132 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

that persecution. Presumably some of the 
originals survived that persecution to serve 
as the basis for new copies. If some of these 
originals did survive from which the copies of 
the age of Constantine may have been made, 
what became of them — the church being then 
fully organized and in a situation to know 
and appreciate their priceless value and to 
preserve them ? If the copies taken in the 
time of Constantine were true copies from 
originals then in possession, what motive 
could there have been for destroying those 
originals, or for suffering them to perish ? 
None whatever. But on the contrary, the 
strongest motive to preserve them in order 
to verify the copies in time of need, — a 
necessity of the utmost importance, which 
had already occurred in reference to other 
copies, and, in the nature of things, was sure 
to occur again. But the fact remains that no 
original remained or is known to have existed 
since the time of Constantine. What motive 
could there have been on the part of the clergy 
to destroy those originals or to neglect their 



INTEGRITY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 133 

preservation and thus connive at their loss? 
Only one: — to prevent any comparison of the 
copy then taken with the original, and thus to 
make an unverified copy, however erroneous 
and fraudulent it might be, the only extant 
evidence of the word of God. 

This conclusion may seem a trifle uncharit- 
able. But the fact that all earlier copies, of 
which there must have been many, at that 
time also disappeared, lends much support to 
our conclusion; and the moral character of the 
clergy of those times justifies it. 

But there is no positive certainty that any of 
the manuscripts of the New Testament survived 
to the time of Constantine, and it is possible 
that only copies were in existence at that time. 
In the latter case the copies taken in the time 
of Constantine — the earliest or most ancient we 
now have, — were copies of copies previously 
made; and were therefore evidence of nothing 
at all. 

In the face of these facts what becomes of the 
claim of divine inspiration for the scriptures of 
the New Testament ? 



134 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

The supremacy of the church in spiritual 
matters was practically undisputed and com- 
plete from the first. But spiritual supremacy 
was only a part of their scheme. The ambi- 
tion of the primates who dominated the affairs 
of the church aspired higher. They saw other 
powers organizing around them, which 
excited their jealousy and fear of rivalry. The 
new governments that were springing up here 
and there out of the ruins of the fallen empire, 
were weak, imperfectly organized and imper- 
fectly administered and were but little capable 
of resisting opposition from any quarter. The 
church everj-where present by its members 
and higher clergy, watched every movement of 
the civil authorities with the closest circum- 
spection. No important act of state must take 
place without the authorization and sanction of 
the clergy. Kings and emperors ruled onry by 
authority of the church. No king was en- 
titled to reign until he had been duly crowned 
and anointed by the pope or by one of his 
subordinates by the pope's permit. Not this ' 
only. The pope was not only the sole author- 



ECCLESIASTICAL SUPREMACY. 135 

ity for conferring crowns ; he also claimed 
the authority and sometimes efficiently exer- 
cised it, to uncrown and dethrone sovereigns. 
It was by his divine commission to absolve 
subjects from their oaths that the pope's inter- 
ference in political affairs was most potential 
and mischievous. No oath between the sover- 
eign and his subjects could be so solemn or 
so binding that the pope might not dissolve it 
by a mere stroke of the pen. An entire 
people was more than once absolved by the 
pope from their allegiance to their sovereign 
lord. As a sample of the influence and power 
which the clergy in those days exerted in civil 
matters, we cite a single instance. The king 
of England to escape worse consequences, was 
compelled to surrender his crown and his 
kingdom to the pope; and afterwards received 
them back as a vassal of the holy church and 
did homage to the pope on his knees for his 
kingdom as a fief of the papacy. No appoint- 
ment could be made to any ecclesiastical bene- 
fice but by consent of the pope. Many fierce 
and bloody contests were waged in support of 



136 CHRISTIANITY VKRSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

the claim of exclusive right to confer ecclesi- 
astical investitures, notwithstanding the fact 
that the higher order of ecclesiastics were, 
ex-omcio, members of the civil government. 
When it was the question of electing a bishop, 
the pope notified the electors, under pain of 
excommunication, whom to elect. Such sug- 
gestions rarely failed to be equivalent to a 
choice. 

The pages of history from the fourth to the 
sixteenth century are filled with the recital 
of the bloody contentions and wars that arose 
out of such interferences, quarrels and con- 
tentions. The establishment of civil govern- 
ments and the progress of civilization were 
greatly impeded and were sometimes wholly 
defeated by them. The one condition of this 
tremendous power of the pope to interfere so 
disastrously lay in the profound ignorance of 
the masses. The clergy had their way 
because the people did not know how to 
assert their rights. The pope represented the 
Almighty whom they dare not disobey. The 
most potent sovereigns were at times driven 



ECCLESIASTICAL SUPREMACY. 137 

to their last resource to find a way of escape 
from the dreadful effect of papal wrath — ex- 
communication, interdicts and absolution of 
their subjects from their oaths of allegiance. 
The kings and rulers of Europe were for 
centuries on their knees before the pope. 

But papal interference did not stop with the 
attempt to control political matters. There 
was still another field to be occupied — the 
domestic life of the people. No baptism and 
no marriage, or divorce, was valid unless cel- 
ebrated by the priest. All others were of 
the devil. Nor could the soul of the dead rest 
in peace unless he had been buried in conse- 
crated ground and his funeral services per- 
formed by a priest. 

But still more the confessional, whereby 
the priests sought to obtain, and often did 
obtain from the penitents the innermost 
secrets of their heart — a precise and intimate 
knowledge of the most secret thoughts and 
acts in the daily lives of the people. This 
was one of the most successful methods of 



138 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY, 

obtaining information of conspiracies and. 
state secrets. 

The clergy declined the jurisdiction of the 
civil power in criminal matters and for many 
centuries successfully asserted their liability 
to be tried only in the ecclesiastical courts, 
which meant simply that they would not be 
tried at all. Hundreds of the most notorious 
criminals annually went scot free without the 
semblance of a trial. 

The avarice of the clergy was insatiable. 
Their resources w T ere large but their demands 
were ever larger. They knew the power of 
wealth and ostentation. They needed vast sums 
to support their luxurious indolence, to build 
costly temples of worship to impress and awe 
the imagination of the vulgar, and to aid their 
intrigues against the civil power. Besides it 
was quite as needful to the spiritual welfare 
of the people that they should be poor and 
remain poor, as it was that the church should 
be rich. Hence the invention of purgatory, 
that intermediate place of torture into which 
every departing soul was sure to fall on its 



HOW THE CHURCH TRIUMPHED. 139 

gloomy route to a future world, and from 
which no power in heaven or in earth, save 
that of the priest, could rescue him. As a 
financial scheme this was a marvelous success. 
It brought into the coffers of the church more 
gold than all the mines of America have yielded. 
Hence, too, later on, the sale of indulgences. 

How all these pretensions and practices 
served to extend and complete the power of 
the priest over the will of ignorant dupes it is 
not difficult to see. 

It is scarcely necessary to speak of the 
moral character of the men who in those ages 
composed the priesthood of the Christian 
Church. Their acts were sufficient to condemn 
them to the depths of degradation. Vile as a 
priest, became a by- word of the nations. Their 
aptitude for falsehood was simply immeasur- 
able. Their licentiousness, their debaucheries, 
their villainies are the blackest and most 
debasing that defile the pages of .history. Their 
rivalries for the honors of the church were 
characterized by the grossest scandals. Unre- 
strained violence and crime often lent their 



140 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

aid to promote the worst of men to the honors 
of the church. Chicanery, violence and 
intrigues of the lowest type were freely 
employed to determine who should administer 
the sacraments of the church, or who should 
be the successor of St. Peter. 

CONVERSION OF THE) PAGANS. 

Though nominally under the care of the 
church, the bulk of the pagan population was 
not strictly in the church. The interest and 
plans of the clergy required a closer union. 
Assuming that they were themselves the 
sole depositaries of all spiritual knowledge, and 
having, as far as possible, repressed all tend- 
ency to independent thought and inquiry, the 
clergy boldly announced themselves to be the 
only authorized interpreters of God's revela- 
tions to man, the only spiritual guide without 
whose aid he must perish. They tell the 
ignorant pagans: You are all of you already 
condemned to eternal woe by reason of Adam's 
sin, and your only escape from that terrible 
punishment is to come into the church and 



CONVERSION OF THE PAGANS. 141 

submit yourselves to our teaching. It is the 
religious duty as well as the interest of every 
son and daughter of Adam's race to accept 
with absolute, unfaltering, unqualified and 
unquestioning belief, all that the priests tell 
you. There must be no questioning, no 
doubting. To err, to doubt even, however 
honestly, is a damnable sin. There is no pos- 
sible way of salvation outside of the church. 
The only way is by and through the holy 
church. Come into the church or go to hell. 
To allure the ignorant masses into the church 
and thus to strengthen and complete their 
hold upon them, the priests, to make their 
doctrines and style of worship more attractive 
to the tastes of the pagans set up idols of their 
own to worship, the Virgin, the Saints and the 
Cross. Christianity was thus deliberately 
degraded and adulterated to render it more 
palatable to pagan idolaters. Of course, mir- 
acles were not wanting. The sick were healed 
by the intercession of the priest at the shrine 
of a saint, by a prayer, by the laying on of 
hands or by rubbing the affected part with the 



14:2 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

bone of a saint. The bone of a saint was often 
carried on the person as a talisman to ward off 
the assaults of the evil spirits and other 
dangers, and was esteemed an object of pro- 
found veneration. Miracles abounded every- 
where and were everywhere implicitly 
believed. These and a thousand other debas- 
ing superstitions were in vogue during those 
centuries of ecclesiastical domination, and 
nothing seemed too absurd for the credulity of 
the people. 

For those w T ho could not be thus attracted 
to the church other means must be found out. 
Those among them who refused to be 
persuaded, must be terrorized. Satan was 
invented — or if not actualfy invented, recon- 
structed and enlarged — a being of power and 
attributes inferior only to the Almighty him- 
self, whose special mission it was to seduce 
man from his allegiance to God and to make 
him his subject to dwell with him forever in 
a hell of fire and brimstone. The world was 
filled with countless myriads of evil spirits, 
obedient messengers of the arch fiend, every- 



CONVERSION OF THE PAGANS. 143 

where present to do his bidding. Every soul 
of man outside of the communion of the 
church was in a state of siege. He was 
surrounded on all sides and at all times by 
multitudes of these emissaries of the devil 
watching the favorable opportunity to wrest 
his soul to destruction. This feature of 
mediaeval theology was elaborated and ex- 
panded to the last degree; and thousands of 
monks exhausted their eloquence in ambitious 
attempts to fitly describe the agonies of the 
damned — the sure portion of all who died 
outside of the communion of the church. 

Persecution remained for all those who could 
be neither coaxed nor frightened into the 
church. All those who neglected and refused 
to accept the supremacy and guidance of the 
church, were denounced as sorcerers, magi- 
cians and children of the devil — the enemies of 
the church and, therefore, of God, and there- 
fore heretics and worthy of death. The Inqui- 
sition was invented especially to hunt out all 
such and consign them to the flames. Many 
thousands of the brightest and best were thus 



144 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

sacrificed. But the church was thereby 
purified and the pope's supremacy rendered 
stronger and safer. It was currently believed 
that many had made a special compact with 
the devil to sell their souls to him and to be 
his subjects for the consideration of his aid and 
assistance in this life. This was the natural 
fruit of the belief in a personal devil. The 
witch delusion, always favored by the priests, 
lasted on almost to our day and sent hundreds 
of thousands of innocent victims to the flames. 
The witch delusion was only one of the many 
engendered by the false teachings of the 
church. 

The masses, enslaved by their ignorance and 
fears, being thus subjected to the domination 
of the clergy, it is not difficult to gather from 
the history of those times, by what means and 
methods the princes and potentates of Chris- 
tendom were rendered subservient to the dicta- 
tion of the clergy. 

In such an age, the pope, at the head of that 
vast hierarchy of prelates and priests every- 
where present in every cit3 T . village and hamlet 



POUCY OF THE CHURCH. 115 

of Christendom, skillfully and thoroughly 
trained to execute the mandates of their chief, 
armed with the omnipotence and wisdom of the 
Almighty, with power to forgive sins, to 
absolve from oaths and obligations the most 
sacred, to rescue souls from purgatory, to heal 
the sick and to cast out devils, and to perform 
miracles of any and all kinds as the occasion 
might require, was a personage and a power 
whom the mightiest monarchs could not ignore 
and dared not despise. 

The greatest fear that obtruded itself into 
the pope's visions of future empire, was, that 
the civil powers springing up around him 
might grow great enough and become strong 
enough to brave his spiritual thunders and 
thus expose their emptiness. Hence the policy 
of the church to keep the rulers of the differ- 
ent peoples at w r ar among themselves that 
they might thus w r eaken, waste and destroy 
each other. It matters but little to the clergy 
wdiat may be the result of the conflict waged 
b}^ one nation against another. The conflict 
itself is the end in view. While the belliger- 



146 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

ents are fiercely struggling to destroy each 
the other, the clergy, intact and sure of their 
footing, look serenely on and prepare to reap 
the benefits of the struggle. Whatever else 
may result to the contestants, they have both 
exhausted their resources and wasted their 
strength ; whereby the church is relatively 
strengthened if not positively benefitted. The 
contestants see, probably when too late, that 
they are both the dupes and victims of the 
priests, who, finally sharing, if he does not 
monopolize all the advantages gained by the 
contest, interposes to dictate the terms of 
peace, arbitrarily bestowing a crown on one 
and a province on another as the case may be. 
The pope might wring his hands in glee at 
the sight of a million of his subjects, led by 
the most renowned monarchs and princes of 
Europe going on a crusade to the Holy Land. 
These crusades continued from the eleventh 
to the thirteenth century, from which few of 
the leaders ever returned to serve their country 
or to dispute the supremacy of the pope. It 
is safe to say that these crusades together 



POWER OF THE CLERGY. 147 

with so-called holy wars in Europe, all of 
which were instigated and pushed forward 
chiefly by the clergy, retarded the civilization 
of Europe several centuries, and caused more 
misery and real disaster to the people and did 
less good than any other one cause mentioned 
in history. 

Another source of the weakness of princes 
was the ignorance of the people. The masses 
below were so besotted, so saturated with 
superstitions and with superstitious fears, 
that they scarcely knew of any other authority 
but that of the pope. They were so trained 
and drilled and awed that the voice of the 
pope is to them the voice of God. In this 
lay the power of the clergy and the weakness 
of sovereigns. Their allegiance to the pope 
was so firmly established that civil rulers 
were rarely able to successfully challenge it ; 
while the pope successfully employed it more 
than once to dethrone a monarch or to achieve 
a subordinate purpose. It goes without saying 
that the policy of civil rulers must be to court 
the favor of his holiness and thus avoid the 



148 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

inflictions of his wrath. This, in fact, for 
man}^ centuries made the sovereigns and 
princes of Christendom almost as subservient 
to the will of the clergy as were the masses 
themselves. And thus the clergy made good 
their assumption that Idngs rule onlyby author- 
ity of the church. They must therefore needs 
adjust their conduct to the dictates of the 
pope. 

Finally, by such means and methods, all 
power ecclesiastical and civil was practically 
centered in the church ; and the church was 
the heirarchy of priests, ignorant, cunning, 
ambitious, covetous of authority and covetous 
of wealth, arrogant, unscrupulous and cor- 
rupt. Christianity, neglected and dishonored, 
was for the time dethroned from the hearts 
of men. The church had taken the place of 
Christianity and had built itself on its ruins. 
This colossal monster which made and unmade 
the kings and rulers of the earth at will, 
excommunicated and banished them from 
their realms and dissolved the allegiance of 
their subjects, had not only dethroned Chris- 



DEGENERACY OF THE CHURCH. 149 

tianity to make room for itself, it had also 
sacrificed to its soaring ambition the only 
principle of human progress — free thought. 
The shadow had, indeed, gone back on the 
dial not ten degrees only, but a hundred. 
Humanity ceased to progress and stood still 
in darkness and in mental and spiritual terror 
for ten centuries. The churcn paralyzed every 
principle of progress and had dried up every 
fountain of joy in the human heart. 

Read what Draper says of the church at the 
time of the Mohammedan conquest, about 
four centuries after Constantine. We quote 
from the work already cited, pp. 245, 246. 

"From its most glorious seats Christianity was for- 
ever expelled; from Palestine, the scene of its most 
sacred recollections ; from Asia Minor, that of its 
first churches ; from Egypt, whence issued the great 
doctrine of Trinitarian orthodoxy ; from Carthage, 
who imposed her belief on Europe." .... 

"The explanation of this political phenomenon is to 
be found in the social condition of the conquered 
countries. The influences of religion in them had 
long ago ceased ; it had become supplanted by theol- 
ogy — a theology so incomprehensible that even the 



150 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

wonderful capabilities of the Greek language were 
scarcely enough to meet its subtle demands ; the Latin 
and the barbarian dialects were out of the question. 
How was it possible that unlettered men, who with 
difficulty can be made to apprehend obvious things, 
should understand such mysteries ? Yet they were 
taught that on those doctrines the salvation or damna- 
tion of the human race depended. They saw that the 
clergy had abandoned the guidance of the individual 
life of their flocks ; that personal virtue or vice were 
no longer considered; that sin was not measured by 
evil works, but by the degrees of heresy. They saw 
that the ecclesiastical chiefs of Rome, Constantinople, 
and Alexandria were engaged in a desperate struggle 
for supremacy, carrying out their purposes' by weap- 
ons and in ways revolting to the conscience of man. 
What an example when bishops are concerned in 
assassinations, poisonings, adulteries, Windings, riots, 
treasons, civil war ; when patriarchs and primates are 
excommunicating and anathematizing one another in 
their rivalries for earthly power, bribing eunuchs with 
gold, and courtesans and royal females with conces- 
sions of episcopal love, and influencing the decisions 
of councils asserted to speak with the voice of God by 
those base intrigues and sharp practices resorted to by 
demagogues in their packed assemblies ! Among 
legions of monks, who carried terror into the imperial 
armies and riot into the great cities, arose hideous 



FAITH WITHOUT REASON. 151 

clamors for theological dogmas, but never a voice for 
intellectual liberty or the outraged rights of man. In 
such a state of things, what else could be the result 
than disgust or indifferentism ? Certainly men could 
not be expected, if a time of necessity arose, to give 
help to a system that had lost all hold on their hearts. ' ' 

Such is the church at the end of only four 
centuries from Constantine. But these were 
centuries of free, unrestrained ecclesiasticism 
under the inspiration and guidance of faith 
without reason. If there had been in their 
religious system anything good, anything in 
airy way calculated to promote the well-being 
of mankind, here was ample opportunity for it 
to develop and bear fruit. But, in fact, the 
results are as barren as those of paganism 
itself. From the beginning the church had 
represented only Paulism and not Christianity. 
When Arius, Pelagius and others from time 
to time attempted to Christianize some of the 
doctrines of the church, by way of rationalizing 
them and adapting them to the comprehension 
of reasonable beings, we have seen what was 
their fate. The hierarchy, especial^ after the 
coming of Constantine, when their ascendency 



152 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

was completely established, did not propose to> 
adopt and practice the pure religion of Christ. 
A system of incomprehensible mysteries which 
they found in Paul's writings, suited their 
purposes far better. What could sound reason 
expect from a mere system of mysteries, — the 
Holy Trinity, whereas the fundamental idea of 
Judahism had always been: "Thou shalt have 
no other gods before me. ' ' How repugnant to 
such a belief that God himself should beget a 
Son to occupy a station equal to himself ! — the 
incarnation of the Son to effect the redemption 
of the whole world of mankind from the fabu- 
lous sin of Adam's fall; his consent in confer- 
ence with the Father to come into the world 
and be sacrificed on the cross as an atonement 
to appease the wrath of the Father , and to 
reconcile him again to the world; and above all 
the mysterious, incomprehensible faith through 
which alone man may be saved, but which no 
man can acquire, which no man can do any- 
thing towards acquiring, — God gives it to 
whom he will — only to the elect of his grace ! 
What could reason expect from such a system ? 



FATAL UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 153 

No opportunity whatever can develop any 
useful results from such a system. What 
element of religious comfort, what element of 
intellectual advancement can the human mind 
find in such a system of religion at its best ? 
But withal was not the medieval church, bad as 
it was, simply the product of the times and con- 
ditions in which it had its origin and growth ? 
The same law that guides and directs the devel- 
opment of a state also guides and determines 
the growth and development of the church. 
The growth and development of the medieval 
church was as natural as the growth of a tree 
in a rich soil, or as the growth of the British 
constitution. I believe none the less that the 
initial step in this downward course — the alli- 
ance of the church with the state — was a 
deliberate fraud on religion, inspired by no 
other than a selfish motive. This begat its 
like as always happens. It opened the door 
of the church and invited the competition of 
ambitious men of all classes to seek its prefer- 
ments. The clean and the unclean alike im- 
mediately entered the lists. It was then a 



154 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

question, not of the best, but of the strongest 
— of who could wield most influence at court 
and camp. And not unfrequently, as too 
often happens, the worst prevailed. Unre- 
strained violence and crime often lent their aid 
to promote the worst of men to the honors of 
the church. In short the church of the 
Middle Ages with all its inconsistencies and 
absurdities, was the product of the times. It 
was born of the conditions of life then exist- 
ing in Europe — ignorance, superstition, civil 
disorder and the want of authority to preserve 
public order. It was a transitional period, 
when the old systems, civil and religious, were 
breaking up and passing away, and a new 
order of things was organizing itself. The 
ignorance and disorder of the times and the 
need of a governing power invited the church 
to take the helm and guide humanity in the 
darkness as well as it might. It arrogated to 
itself all authority spiritual and temporal, 
multiplying and magnifying its powers as the 
occasion seemed to require. And, by appeal- 
ing alternately to the prejudices, superstitions 



MYSTKRIES. 135 

or fears of trie masses, it rendered a vast 
service to human society by preserving a 
degree of order in those chaotic times. It was 
the need of a paramount authority to tide 
society through this transitional period, that 
gave to the church its opportunity, its growth 
and power and its sole usefulness in the cause 
of civilization. When that service had been 
completed, all cause for the existence of that 
organization ceased. When its useful work 
was done the mighty organization could not 
dissolve but survived only to vex, harass and 
retard the progress of humanity. 

The old Greeks had their sacred mysteries 
which were guarded with the most jealous 
care b}^ a chosen priesthood. To these alone 
was it permitted to know the pregnant 
import of those mysteries, and to celebrate 
them by appropriate symbolical acts, spec- 
tacles, ceremonies and liturgies. The Hindus 
long before our era, had their trinity, Brahma, 
Vishnu and Siva. For thirty centuries the 
Egyptians had been familiar with the idea oi 
a triune God — Osiris, Isis and Horus. And 



156 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

what is remarkable, Osiris consented to become 
incarnated for the salvation of men. He fell 
a sacrifice to the evil principle, and after his 
death and resurrection he was appointed to 
judge the dead. Ahriman, the Prince of 
Darkness, the archetype of the Christian Satan 
was familiar to the Persians many centuries 
before our era. The idea of the immaculate 
conception of the Virgin was not a new thing 
in the early part of our era. There had pre- 
viously been several similar instances. 

We need not, therefore, be at a loss to com- 
prehend whence the fathers of the church drew 
the material for their theological system. The 
central figure around which all the other parts 
combined, is the sacrifice on the Cross; and is 
undeniably Hebraic and of the most ancient 
and heathenish type. This sacrifice carries 
in the dim, shadowy outline of its surround- 
ings the figure of an angry God demanding 
the sacrifice. 

The doctrines of the Trinity were the con- 
tribution of Egypt to this grand piece. Range 
around the great central sacrifice and the 



PAUUSM — MYSTERIES. 157 

Cross, three deities, Father, Son and Holy- 
Ghost, all coeternal and all equal in power, 
majesty and glory; but all composing only one 
triune God. The church persecuted Arius 
as long as he lived, banished him often and 
finally killed him for maintaining that the 
Son must be younger than his Father. The 
old rhymes which have served to express the 
unbelief and gentle raillery of many genera- 
tions, are still apropos : 

"That three are one and one is three, 
Is an idea that puzzles me. 
By many a learned sage, 'tis said, 
That there are three in the Godhead. 
The Father, Son and Holy Ghost 
Are three at least and one at most. " 
Add to these the Persian conception of a 
personal devil, a being dangerously near to 
the Almighty in wisdom and power : ' 'Whose 
care was with the Eternal to be deemed equal 
in strength ; and rather than be less cared not 
to be at all." 

This arch demon with his innumerable 
cohorts is ever active in causing enmity be- 
tween God and man. Add too, a flaming 



158 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

hell of fire and brimstone, as a place of pun- 
ishment for the damned whom God's partiality 
has left among the non-elect. These consti- 
tute the main features of the frame work. 
Add to these the minor parts — Christ's incar- 
nation, his divinity, his resurrection, his ascen- 
sion and the marvelous efficacy of his sacrifice 
to relieve mankind of their sins — the way of 
salvation by grace and faith ; add all these 
and we shall have a system of oriental mys- 
teries in sight of which the Kleusinian would 
hide their diminished heads in shame. 

Interfuse and vitalize this frame with the 
spirit of Original Sin — the willingness of an 
angry God to damn the whole human race for 
the sin of one man. Thus framed and thus 
vitalized, and with ambitious' and unscrupu- 
lous place-hunters as its organs of intellect 
and activity, it fed on the want, weakness and 
ignorance of the people, devoured their sub- 
stance, repressed their growth and grew and 
waxed fat by what it fed on, till it became 
the vilest mass of false doctrines, hypocrisies 
and superstitions, and the most colossal tyr- 



PAUEISM QUESTIONED. 159 

rany that ever afflicted mankind. Such was 
the Church of the Fathers in its full and free 
development. There is nowhere to be found 
in all this a trace of Christianity. It was the 
reign of Faith without reason. Christianity 
was in abeyance. It was Paulism in its nor- 
mal development. 

It must not, however, be supposed that all 
these claims, pretensions and practices of the 
church went wholly unchallenged. No tyr- 
anny can wholly suppress the activities of the 
human intellect. All along, at intervals, 
sometimes wide intervals, there arose certain 
exalted spirits courageous enough to brave 
persecution and even death, for the right to 
express their opinions, men who, in spite of 
the power and tyranny of the priesthood, 
dared to arraign the bishops for their false 
doctrines and falser conduct. We have 
already mentioned two such, Arius and Pela- 
gius. Another such was Gotschalk, a, German 
monk of the ninth century, who controverted 
the doctrine of predestination; and John Kri- 
gena, about the same time, attacked with 



160 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

great force the doctrines of transubstantiation 
and many others. Gerbert and Berenger of 
Tours, in the eleventh century, following the 
example of those mentioned, boldly pro- 
claimed that reason was man's only guide in 
religious matters as in others. Peter Abelard 
a man of great natural ability, adorned with 
all the learning of his age, in the twelfth cen- 
tury attacked the dogmas of the church on 
many points — original sin, faith, the trinity, 
transubstantiation, etc., — with tremendous 
force. And Wickliff in England, in the four- 
teenth century opposed the doctrine of tran- 
substantiation. It was this stout-hearted old 
Anglo Saxon who declared that "God 
requireth not of any man to believe what he 
cannot understand." John Huss and Jerome of 
Prague, those two great Bohemians, were burnt 
.at the stake in the fifteenth century for dissem- 
inating the doctrines of Wickliff — two great 
men of great learning and zeal for the cause 
of truth, sacrificed to the bigotry and intoler- 
ance of the church. 

These men were all fiercely persecuted, 



REASON RAISES ITS VOICE. 131 

their doctrines denounced and anathematized 
as heretical, their books were burnt and the 
authors themselves exiled, imprisoned or burnt 
at the stake. These men were the real heroes 
of their age — the precursors of better times. 
Whatever may have been their errors they 
believed what they taught and were, each in 
his age, the representative of free thought and 
of true Christianity. Their example and their 
sacrifices served at once to keep alive the love 
of liberty natural to all, and as indices of the 
bigotry and intolerance of the orthodox 
church. These attempts were all in the way 
of rationalizing the doctrines of the church. 

The Emperor, Otho the Third, about the 
close of the tenth century, made a vigorous 
attempt by force of arms to reform the abuses 
of the clergy. But though assisted by the 
valuable aid of that renowned ecclesiastic, 
Gerbert, he wholly failed in his design. 
Again, in the first part of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, the Emperor, Frederick II, a man of 
courage and capacity, openly denounced the 
pope for his crimes and invoked the aid of the 



162 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

people to assist him in correcting abuses which 
had become too scandalous to be borne. But 
all in vain. The grasp of the hierarchy on 
the Intellect of the age was too firm to be 
disseized. Many men here and there were 
privately thinking for themselves, but the 
masses were wholly captivated and spellbound 
by the delusions of the church. 

From the time when the Emperor, Frederick 
II, vainly invoked the aid of Christian Europe 
to curtail the pretensions of the priesthood 
and to correct their scandalous lives, to the 
time of Martin Luther, was an interval of 
about two hundred and sixty years during 
which several great events occurred which 
greatly facilitated the intellectual development 
of all Europe. The first of these was the 
capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 
1453. Already Christendom had lost from 
her former domain, Africa, Egypt, Palestine, 
Asia Minor and Spain. And now to lose this 
famed Capitol with its adjacent territories and 
population to their despised competitor, was 
indeed an event to move the thoughts and 



UGHT BEGINS TO SHINE. 163 

sensibilities of even Monks. The Moslems 
were now pressing on Christendom on two 
sides in Europe instead of one. But in a sub- 
ordinate way this event favored the growth of 
civilization in Europe. Constantinople was a 
Greek city, and when it fell, to escape the 
tyranny of their new masters, thousands of 
their best citizens at once exiled themselves 
fleeing to Italy and other European countries. 
These carried with them an ample store of 
ancient Greek literature and philosophy, and 
becoming teachers and professors of Greek 
literature and learning in the schools and col- 
leges, contributed greatly to the revival of 
learning, especially in southern Europe. 

The Mohammedans who had conquered 
Spain in the eighth century had long since 
established there a civilization far in advance 
of anything hitherto known in Christian 
Europe. Zealous patrons of all kinds of 
learning they had established schools of the 
highest grade which had attracted the atten- 
tion and attendance of students and scholars 
from all parts of Europe. The effect of these 



164 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

schools so close on the borders of Christendom, 
together with the teaching of the Greek 
classics in Italy and elsewhere, was to keep 
alive and diffuse the light of knowledge over 
benighted Europe. 

Another event of transcendent importance 
came just about the same time as the fall of 
Constantinople — the discovery of the art of 
printing. It is easy to understand how this 
most useful discovery served to advance the 
intellectual development by recording and 
preserving in a tangible and readable form the 
thoughts of the wise and the learned to be dif- 
fused, known, and read of all. It furnished 
the means through which knowledge was con- 
veyed to the poor to be read and pondered in 
their moments of leisure and thus entertained, 
exercised and developed the intellectual facul- 
ties. It is stated that in the year 1500, when 
L,uther was a youth of seventeen years, there 
were two hundred printing presses in Europe; 
and many books had been printed, notably the 
Bible. Of course we cannot estimate with 
precision the effect of all this, but it is safe to 



I^IGHT BEGINS TO DAWN. 16^ 

assert that on the torpid, ignorant populations 
of Europe as they were in those times, the 
effect must have been prodigious in the direc- 
tion of provoking inquiry, learning to read, 
etc. 

But still another great discovery occurring 
near the close of the fifteenth century was 
perhaps more adapted to arouse the priest- 
ridden population of Europe than either of 
those already mentioned — the discovery of 
America. What could have astonished the 
denizens of Europe so much as to learn that 
just across the western ocean, only a few days 
distant, there was a continent nearly as large 
and quite as beautiful as that east of that sea. 
The effect of this discovery was prodigious on 
all classes. It aroused their imaginations and 
set them to thinking that there are more things 
in the world than the priests had ever told 
them of. Many sought and obtained the 
opportunity to make the voyage to the new 
world. They came back as oracles, to spread 
the news of what they had seen. It was an 
era in the intellectual development of Europe. 



166 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

The world had been for a long time waiting 
for a change. But changes come only in their 
own time and way. The time was not yet, 
but was near. The conditions were preparing 
and when they are ready the change will 
supervene. The aggregate intelligence of man- 
kind was greatly enlarged by causes wholly 
beyond the control of pope and priests. If St. 
Augustine could have lived to read the report 
of Columbus's voyages and discoveries, which 
were Undertaken and prosecuted under the 
heretical conception that the earth is a globe 
revolving in space around the sun; and if he 
could have read the report of Magellan's actual 
circumnavigation of the globe, a demonstra- 
tion which even the bigotry of the church 
could not gainsay, he would, no doubt, have 
revised and corrected his astronomical theory 
and probably his theological theory. There 
is much reason to believe that he was as far 
wrong when he has the universe created for 
man — God's greatest and best, etc. — as he was 
when he made the earth the center of the solar 
system. 



DEGRADATION OF THE MASSES. 167 

In this age of free thought and of free 
inquiry, when all the accumulated stores of 
knowledge and science of the past are open 
and free to the inspection of all, it is extremely 
difficult to picture to ourselves any adequate 
conception of the degradation of the masses 
of Europe in the fifteenth century — the close 
of the regime of faith. For more than a 
thousand years dating from the era of Con- 
stantine, the clergy had practically monopo- 
lized the little learning then extant, and had 
controlled the cause of education in general. 
It is no violence to assume that a body of men 
who inspired the thought of destroying all 
secular learning as rubbish in the way of 
building the power of ecclesiasticism, and had 
enthusiastically united their efforts with those 
of the Emperor to thoroughly accomplish that 
purpose, would employ the means in their 
control to perpetuate the same policy. Igno- 
rance of the masses was the foundation on 
which the superstructure of the church had 
been erected. And on this alone could it 
continue to stand. Some schools were estab- 



168 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

lished, certainly, here and there where the 
little learning of those times was taught ; but 
these were only for the few rich and noble. 
There were no schools for the instruction of 
the masses, save such as the priests themselves 
conducted for the special purposes of the 
church. The masses of the people were 
extremely illiterate, densely ignorant, and as 
superstitious as they were ignorant. The in- 
tellect of the age had been systematically- 
starved and dwarfed all these ages to conform 
it to the standard of the church — to the belief 
in miracles, the infallibility of the pope, his 
power to forgive sin and a thousand other 
delusions. Here and there w T as one outside 
of the church who was secretly doing his own 
thinking, but ninety-nine hundredths of the 
whole w T ere hopeless slaves to ignorance and 
superstition. It is extremely difficult, I say, 
for people of the present time to realize the 
degradation, poverty and distress which the 
multitude, in that long series of centuries, 
suffered from the domination of the church. 
They felt that they were oppressed, but they 



A NKW ERA AT HAND. 169 

and not possess knowledge enough to com- 
prehend what was oppressing them. They 
felt, without knowing, that there was need of 
a change. But they had no conception of 
what change was needed. In the lap of 
"Mother Church" they had been lulled into 
a stupor that was almost death itself. 

Already before the close of the fifteenth 
century the influence of the Arabic schools 
was beginning to be felt. A love of classical 
learning had been kindled, which, aided by 
the inventions and discoveries before men- 
tioned, was already shedding light enough 
to make the darkness of the times visible. 
Daylight was dawning. The people began to 
see the portentous shadow that had so long 
darkened their lives. That prolonged night 
that had succeeded the brilliant day of Greece 
and Rome, was about to end in the dawning 
of another day of light and beauty for human- 
ity. The greatest step ever taken in the evo- 
lution of humanity was about to -fall — the 
great religious Reformation of the Sixteenth 
Century. 



170 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 



CHAPTER IV. 

The Religious Reformation of the Six- 
teenth Century — Resume. 

To afford the reader another proof of the 
extreme degradation to which the church 
descended under the regime of Faith without 
Reason, and at the same time a graphic 
description of the circumstances in which the 
great Reformation had its origin, I quote again 
from D'Aubigne's History, vol. i, p. 209. 
The time is 15 17. 

A great agitation reigned, at that time, among the 
people of Germany. The Church had opened a vast 
market on the earth. Judging from the crowd of 
buyers, and the noise and jests of the dealers, we 
might call it a fair, but a fair held by monks. The 
merchandise they extolled, offering it at a reduced 
price, was, said they, the salvation of souls ! 

The dealers passed through the country in a gay 
carriage, escorted by three horsemen, in great state, 
and spending freely. One might have thought it some 



EXTREME DEGRADATION. 171 

dignitary on a royal progress, with his attendants 
and officers; and not a common dealer, or a begging 
monk. When the procession approached a town, a 
messenger waited on the magistrate. "The grace of 
God, and of the Holy Father, is at your gates !" said 
the envoy. Instantly everything was in motion in 
the place. The clergy, the priests, the nuns, the 
council, the schoolmasters, the trades, with their 
flags — men and women, young and old — went forth 
to meet the merchants, with lighted tapers in their 
hands, advancing to the sound of music, and of all the 
bells of the place; "so that," says an historian, "they 
could not have given a grander welcome to God him- 
self." Salutations being exchanged, the whole pro- 
cession moved toward the church. The pontiff's bull 
of grace was borne in front, on a velvet cushion, or on 
a cloth of gold. The chief vendor of indulgences 
followed, supporting a large red wooden cross; and 
the whole procession moved in this manner, amidst 
singing, prayers, and the smoke of incense. The 
sound of organs, and a concert of instruments, received 
the monkish dealer and his attendants into the 
church. The cross he bore with him was erected in 
front of the altar: on it was hung the pope's arms; 
and, as long as it remained there, the clergy of the 
place, the penitentiaries, and the sub-commissioners, 
with white wands in their hands, came every day 
after vespers, or before the salutation to do homage 



172 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

to it. This great bustle excited a lively sensation in 
the quiet towns of Germany. 

One person in particular drew the attention of the 
spectators in these sales. It was he who bore the 
great red cross and had the most prominent part 
assigned to him. He was clothed in the habit of the 
Dominicans, and his port was lofty. His voice was 
sonorous, and he seemed yet in the prime of his 
strength, though he was past his sixty-third year. 
This man, who was the son of a goldsmith of Leipsic 
named Diez, bore the name of John Diezel or Tetzel. 
Pie had studied in his native town, had taken his 
bachelor's degree in 1487, and entered two years later 
into the order of the Dominicans. Numerous honors 
had been accumulated on him. Bachelor of Theology, 
Prior of the Dominicans, Apostolical Commissioner, 
Inquisitor, (heretico pravitatis inquisitor,) he had 
ever since the year 1502, filled the office of an agent 
for the sale of indulgences. The experience he had 
acquired as a subordinate functionary had very early 
raised him to the station of chief commissioner. He 
had an allowance of eighty florins per month, all his 
expenses defrayed, and he was allowed a carriage and 
three horses; but we may readily imagine that his indi- 
rect emoluments far exceeded his allowances. In 1507, 
he gained in two days at Freyberg 2000 florins. If his 
occupation resembled that of a mountebank, he had 
also the morals of one. Convicted at Inspruck of adul- 



EXTREME DEGRADATION. 173 

iery and abominable profligacy, he was near paying 
the forfeit of his life. The Emperor Maximilian had 
ordered that he should be put into a sack and thrown 
into the river. The Elector Frederic of Saxony had 
interceded for him, and obtained his pardon. But the 
lesson he had received had not taught him more 
decency. He carried about with him two of his chil- 
dren. Miltitz, the pope's legate, cites the fact in one 
of his letters. It would have been hard to find in all 
the cloisters of Germany a man more adapted to the 
traffic with which he was charged. To the theology 
of a monk, and the zeal and spirit of an inquisitor, 
he united the greatest effrontery. What most helped 
him in his office was the facility he displayed in the 
invention of the strange stories with which the taste 
•of the common people is generally pleased. No means 
came amiss to him to fill his coffers. lifting up his 
voice and giving loose to a coarse volubility, he offered 
his indulgences to all comers, and excelled any sales- 
man at a fair in recommending his merchandise. 

As soon as the cross was elevated with the pope's 
.arms suspended upon it, Tetzel ascended the pulpit 
and, with a bold tone, began, in the presence of the 
crowd whom the ceremony had drawn to the sacred 
spot, to exalt the efficacy of indulgences. The people 
listened and wondered at the admirable virtues as- 
cribed to them. A Jesuit historian says himself, in 
speaking of the Dominican friars whom Tetzel had 



171 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

associated with him: "Some of these preachers did 
not fail, as usual, to distort their subject, and so to 
exaggerate the value- of the indulgences as to lead the 
people to believe that, as soon as they gave their 
money, they were certain of salvation and of the 
deliverance of souls from purgatory." 

If such were the pupils, we may imagine to what 
lengths the master went. Let us hear one of these 
harangues pronounced after the erection of the cross. 

"Indulgences," said he, "are the most precious and 
sublime of God's gifts. 

"This cross'' — (pointing to the red cross) — "has as 
much efficacy as the cross of Jesus Christ. 

"Draw near, and I will give you letters, duly sealed, 
by which even the sins you shall hereafter desire to 
commit shall be all forgiven you. 

"I would not exchange my privileges for those of 
Saint Peter in heaven, for I have saved more souls 
than he with his sermons. 

"There is no sin so great that the indulgence cannot 
remit it, and even if any one should (which is doubt- 
less impossible) ravish the Holy Virgin Mother of 
God, let him pay — let him only pay largely, and it 
shall be forgiven him. 

"Even repentance is not indispensable. 

"But more than all this: indulgences save not the 
living alone; they also save the dead. 

"Ye priests, ye nobles, ye tradesmen, ye wives, ye 






TETZEI/S PREACHING. 175 

maidens, and ye young men hearken to your departed 
parents and friends, who cry to you from the bottom- 
less abyss: 'We are enduring horrible torment! A 
small alms would deliver us; you can give it, and you 
will not !' " 

A shudder ran through his hearers at these words, 
uttered by the formidable voice of the mountebank 
monk. 

"The very moment," continued Tetzel, "that the 
money clinks against the bottom of the chest, the 
soul escapes from purgatory and flies free to heaven. 

"O, senseless people, and almost like to beasts, 
who do not comprehend the grace so richly offered! 
This day, heaven is on all sides open. Do you now 
refuse to enter? When, then, do you intend to come 
in? This day you may redeem many souls. Dull 
and heedless man, with ten groschen you can deliver 
your father from purgatory, and you are so ungrateful 
that you will not rescue him. In the day of judg- 
ment, my conscience will be clear ; but you will be 
punished the more severely for neglecting so. great a 
salvation. I protest that though you should have 
only one coat, you ought to strip it off and sell it to 
purchase this grace. Our Lord God no longer deals 
with us as God. He has given all power to the Pope!" 

Probably no great event in the history of 
mankind was more strictly spontaneous than 



176 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

the Religious Reformation of the Sixteenth 
Century. That Reformation, from first to last, 
presents the remarkable phenomenon of a vast 
revolution beginning and moving steadily and 
resistlessly forward to its culmination, without 
a leader. Martin Luther was, no doubt, more 
conspicuously identified with that great move- 
ment than was any other individual. But 
Luther did not make the Reformation nor was 
he in any sense the cause of it. It was rather 
the Reformation that made Luther ^ Luther 
had, from the beginning of his career, as a 
minister and teacher, planted himself squarely 
on the plain teachings of the New Testament 
scriptures, as the only infallible guide for 
Christians; and, from first to last, during the 
contest, he did no more than to maintain his 
position, adjusting his action to the demands 
of the occasion as they arose amid the storm 
that was beating around him. 

As a specimen at once, of the style and sub- 
stance of his preaching in the early period of 
the Reformation we make the following quota- 
tion from History: 



E ^FORMATION SPONTANEOUS. 177 

"No one can show from the Scriptures that God's 
justice requires a penalty or satisfaction from the 
sinner," said the faithful minister of the word to the 
people of Wittemberg. "The only duty it imposes 
on him is a true repentance, a sincere change of 
heart, a resolution to bear the cross of Christ, and to 
strive to do good works." (id. 233). 

The same author in speaking of L,uther's 
connection with the Reformation, says: 

Luther was at this time (after the Reformation 
was begun) full of respect for the Church and the 
Pope. He says himself, "I was then a monk — a papist 
of the maddest — so infatuated and even steeped in 
the Romish doctrines, that L would willingly have 
helped to kill any one who had the audacity to refuse 
the smallest act of obedience to the Pope. " ... He 
has as yet no thought of reforming the Church and 
the world. He has seen Rome and its corruption ; 
but he does not erect himself against Rome. He dis- 
cerns some of the abuses under which Christendom 
groans, but he has no thought of correcting these 
abuses. He does not desire to constitute himself a 
reformer. He has no more plan in his mind for the 
reform of the church than he had previously had for 
that which had been wrought in his own soul. God 
himself designed a Reformation and to make Luther 
the instrument of its accomplishment, (id. 232). 



178 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

The author quotes Luther as saying, "I 
entered on this controversy (the Reformation) 
without any settled purpose or inclination, and 
entirely unprepared." (id. 231). 

As late as May, 1518, when the Reformation 
had been in full blast at least one year, 
Luther addresses to the pope a letter full of 
submissive sentiment and ending in these 
words: 

"Therefore, most holy Father, I throw myself at the 
feet of your Holiness, and submit myself to you, with 
all that I have and ill that I am. ... I will receive 
your voice as that of Christ himself, who presides and 
speaks through you. " (id. 311). 

What fuller or clearer proof could we have 
that Luther was not a voluntary agent mov- 
ing and directing this vast religious and social 
upheaval, but, to use the language of the his- 
torian, he was a mere instrument only, in the 
hands of powers wholly external to himself, 
which no man controlled, but which them- 
selves controlled the actions of all men. We 
are often deceived by appearances. It is not 



LUTHER AN INSTRUMENT. 179 

the trowel that builds the palace wall, but the 
man that handles the trowel. 

As touching the spontaneity of the move- 
ment the author referred to very pertinently 
remarks: "The singular system of theology 
that had established itself in the church, was 
fitted powerfully to assist in opening the eyes 
of the rising generation. Formed for a dark 
age, as if the darkness were to endure forever, 
this system was destined to be superseded and 
scattered to the winds as soon as the age 
should outgrow it. " (id. 63). 

The mine was already prepared. The intel- 
lect of the age had indeed outgrown its con- 
dition and an adjustment must take place. 
Increased knowledge of the times had filtered 
down to the lower strata of the social scale, 
and millions were beginning to see the light 
and to think. A wide-spread and powerful 
cause was making itself universally felt and 
all signs portended an explosion. The Ger- 
mans especially who had been for centuries 
systematically robbed to build costly temples at 
Rome and elsewhere and to support dissolute 



180 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

priests in sumptuous ease and elegance were 
almost in a state of combustion. Occasion or 
cause for a thorough reform of religion had 
existed for ages. The shameless abuses of 
the church, the immoralities and licentious 
lives of the clergy, their hypocrisies and false 
doctrines and the outrageous tyranny which 
the whole system of the hierarchy imposed on 
mankind, all these had been cause enough 
to make men cry out for reform. Even the 
sale of indulgences was no new thing. A 
system of superstition built upon the ignor- 
ance of the people and patiently acquiesced in 
for ages, can only be shaken off or reformed 
when the people have advanced to a higher 
intelligence. Causes for reform existed on all 
sides. But a sufficient intellectual develop- 
ment, as the necessary condition of success, 
was wanting until the beginning of the six- 
teenth century. 

The mine was all ready to fire. The partic- 
ulars of the manner in which the train was 
fired may be summarized as follows: 

While Tetzel and others were producing 



REFORMATION BEGINS. 1M 

great commotion in the adjacent neighborhood 
Luther was quietly performing his duties at 
Wittemberg as a professor of theology, 
preacher, pastor and confessor. On one oc- 
casion several residents of Wittemberg con- 
fessed to him the commission of great offenses. 
He reproved them and advised them to repent 
and to correct their course of life. The con- 
fessed criminals boldly asserted that they did 
not intend to abandon their sins. Whereupon 
Luther refused to absolve them. They pro- 
duced to him their letters of indulgence from 
Tetzel. Luther told them that these letters 
could not avail. They subsequently renew 
their application for absolution, but Luther 
was immovable. ' 'You must, ' ' said he to them, 
' 'cease to do evil and learn to do well, or, other- 
wise no absolution." "Have a care," said he, 
' 'how you give ear to the indulgences: you have 
something better to do than to buy licenses 
which they offer you for paltry pence." 
The confessed report to Tetzel that an Augus- 
tine monk treated his letters with contempt. 
Tetzel raved; and the Reformation was begun. 



182 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

The simple performance of a religious duty 
such as no conscientious priest could have 
avoided, was the first direct step in the great 
Reformation and places Luther in the lead. 
Luther became the apparent leader of that 
gigantic movement, without any intentio?i or 
motive of initiating a reform or of assailing 
the church or the pope. Without the slight- 
est intention of reforming religion or the 
church, he becomes, by the sheer force of cir- 
cumstances beyond his control, the reformer 
of both. 

Luther was a man of capacity, learning and 
courage. Above all he was a sincere man and 
could only teach what he believed to be true. 
After telling those who applied for absolution 
that he could not respect their letters of indul- 
gence, he felt that as professor and pastor his 
duty to his pupils and to his parishioners, 
required of him that he should give a reason 
for his conduct. He therefore published his 
ninety-five theses, or reasons against the sale 
of indulgences, which set all Europe aflame. 

Where reasons are so obvious and so clearly 



REFORMATION EVOLUTIONARY. 183 

adequate to the results, we do not need to 
attribute the acts of men to human volition. 
In accounting for man's actions on the stage 
of life the only guide we have is our reason. 
We cannot arbitrarily assign to the will of 
man an act which is naturally and logically 
accounted for by a cause which reason recog- 
nizes as the true cause. The example of 
IyUther very strongly confirms the automatic 
theory, showing that man is not a free agent, 
but that even in the great affairs of life, when 
he seems to be ruling and directing the great- 
est movements by his own will, he is simply a 
passive instrument in the hands of a force 
wholly external to himself and over which he 
has no control whatever. The forces of the 
Reformation consisted in the concurrence of 
the religious and social evils of the times, 
with a degree of mental development sufficient 
to comprehend the evils, to cope with them 
and correct them. The Reformation was 
Nature's own effort to cleanse and purify the 
moral atmosphere, as a thunder storm purifies 
the material atmosphere. The church in a 



184 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

time of universal ignorance and mental stag- 
nation had grown and magnified itself into a 
hideous incubus destructive of all mentaL 
progress. At last, thanks to the printing; 
press and other causes mentioned, men began 
to think. They soon saw that it was the 
priesthood which stood in the way of their 
progress. The power of the church must be 
curtailed and overthrown to allow humanity 
to progress. This was the Reformation. 

The great Reformation of the sixteenth 
century was the first successful movement to 
purify the church and to rationalize its doc- 
trines. The primitive church of the Apostolic 
times had been overladen with dogma, super- 
stition and priest-craft, until religion, in any 
proper sense, was completely buried, smoth- 
ered to death. The Reformation, as all former 
attempts, was made on the line of rationalizing 
the doctrines of the church. At the beginning 
of the sixteenth century the church repre- 
sented a religion of Faith regardless of reason. 
Secular learning had been destroyed, and in- 
tellectual inquiry discouraged and suppressed 



REFORMATION EMANCIPATES. 185~ 

in order to give Faith a free course. This 
plan, as has been shown, eventuated in the 
most disgusting mockery of sacred things and 
in the most tyrannous despotism that ever 
oppressed the soul of man. 

Now the emancipation of man from the 
darkness and terror of the church is about to 
begin. The great Reformation was the first 
successful movement in that direction. It 
accomplished a great deal, but not, the half of 
all that was required. It frightened the old 
church into a measure of personal decency, 
and into lopping off many absurd pretensions 
and superstitious practices. But the great 
and crowning glory of the Reformation was 
the establishment for all and for all time of 
the Right of Free Thought, Free Inquiry, and 
of Private Opinion. This great doctrine has 
blossomed out and borne fruit in the free 
political institutions of Europe and America. 
The Reformation was a great step in the right 
direction, but it was only the beginning of 
the great work of restoring Christianity to its 
pristine simplicity and purity. It did not 



136 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHOEOX THEOI.OGY. 

destroy the old church nor the old theological 
system. The old church still survives to vex 
and hinder the progress of civilization. The 
seceding new church organizations — while 
they left behind them much that was objec- 
tionable in the old church — took with them 
and adopted the principal fundamental doc- 
trines of the Medieval Church. Luther was 
himself a firm believer in the existence of a 
personal devil of power dangerously near to 
that of the Almighty. He believed in a mater- 
ial hell of fire and in demonology and witch- 
craft and many other superstitions. All these 
he believed and handed on down to his 
adherents. 

By re-enthroning the human intellect as the 
guiding principle of man's life, the Reformation 
has made continued progress possible. The 
progress since that day has been necessarily 
slow. Beliefs so inveterate cannot be eradi- 
cated in a day. Demonology and witchcraft, 
with all their attendant superstitions and hor- 
rors, continued to hold their place among the 
beliefs of even the Protestant churches for nearly 



LUTHER'S SUPERSTITIONS. 187 

two centuries after the time of Luther. But 
these at last fled away as the shades of night 
flee away before the coming day. The eradi- 
cation and extinction of these horrid illusions 
is one of the great triumphs of intellectual 
growth — of the reign of Reason. 

Another one is the expulsion of that hideous 
bugbear the Devil; and the extinguishment ot 
the flames of Hell. These were very impor- 
tant features in Medieval theology. That 
system would have been very lame without 
these. Resting on very slight and, as I think, 
falsely interpreted authority, these were the 
inventions of the priests to alarm and frighten 
the ignorant. Nothing demonstrates the slow 
progress of the Reformation more conclusively 
than that these delusions of the dark ages 
should have continued to hold their place in 
Protestant theology far into the nineteenth 
century. But we now rarely hear these ter- 
rors denounced from Protestant pulpits. They 
long since ceased to disturb the repose of sen- 
sible people. The clergy have learned that 
the love of God is a more inviting theme and 



188 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

far more effective to win souls to Christ. The 
crudities of that wonderful system of medieval 
theology — of faith, fiction and falsehood — dis- 
appear one after another under the influence of 
increased intelligence. 

The continued progress of the Reformation 
shows itself very conspicuously in another 
respect — religious toleration. We have seen 
with what bitterness the orthodox church 
during all its existence down to the time of 
the Reformation, watched and punished the 
slightest departure from the strict rules of 
orthodoxy. The logic of their conduct was:: 
you must believe as we do or you are a here- 
tic and deserve to be burnt. This same spirit 
in all its savageness descended to the Protes- 
tant churches, who never failed to persecute 
each other as the opportunity offered. When 
the High Church party was in the ascendant, 
all were required to conform, or to suffer fine, 
imprisonment, the pillory and ruin. When 
the Independents and Presbyterians had the 
inns, they played it back on their religious 
foes after the same style. Archbishop Laud 



INHERITED EVII,S. 189 

•was executed nominally for high treason, but 
really for his persecutions against the Inde- 
pendents and Presbyterians. The history of 
these bloody persecutions is written in many 
volumes. Slowly this bane of true Christian- 
ity has yielded to the increasing light of civ- 
ilization. Little by little Reason has tempered 
the bigotry of sects, one towards another. 
The spirit of Christianity has softened the 
asperity of their mutual hatreds, until under 
the restraints of the civil power, if for no 
other cause, the different denominations dwell 
together in peace — though not even yet in 
complete harmony loving each other as they 
do themselves. 

RESUME. 

Jesus came and taught the people the sim- 
plest and purest, the most reasonable and 
most civilizing religion ever offered to man. 
He begins by telling them that he is come to 
call sinners to repentance and to fulfill the 
law; and tells them what the law is: Love 
God with all your heart and love your neigh- 



190 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

bor as yourself. He leaves nothing undone 
to make plain to them the scope of his mean- 
ing and the reasonableness of these command- 
ments. God is your heavenly Father, your 
Creator and the giver of every blessing you 
enjoy. He desires that you, his children, 
should all be happy and that none should 
perish. He is ever ready to freely pardon the 
offenses of all who sincerely repent. Pointing 
to God, the fountain of mercy, truth, justice 
and love, he tells them: "Be ye therefore 
perfect even as your Father which is in 
heaven is perfect;" and proceeds to show 
them how they may at least imitate the 
moral perfections of God himself as a standard. 

Be merciful and kind to everybody and 
treat all with respect. 

Repress your covetousness and selfishness, 
for, "A man's life consisteth not in the abund- 
ance of the things which he possesseth." 

Be generous and give to the poor to relieve 
their wants. But make no ostentation of your 
alms to be seen of men. 

Be content with your lot. Seek no prefer- 



CHRISTIANITY RESTATED. 191 

ments. For he that is greatest among you 

shall be your servant; and whosoever shall 

exalt himself shall be abased. 

Be honest and just in all your dealings one 

with another. Whatsoever ye would that 

men should do to you, do ye even so to them, 

for this is the law. 

Be charitable in your judgments of your 

fellow men; for your neighbors will judge you 

as you judge them. * 

Do no wrong to your neighbor, commit no 

murder, no adultery, no theft, no lying, no 
false witness. Cherish no ill will against your 
neighbor, nor indulge any sentiment of re- 
venge or of retaliation against him on account 
of any wrong he may have done you. But 
fully and freely pardon his wrong as you 
would have God forgive your offenses. Return 
good for. evil. Love all your neighbors as 
brothers, as children of the same Heavenly 
Father. Love not only them who love you, 
but I say unto you, "Love your enemies, 
bless them that curse you, do good to them 
that hate you, and pray for them which 



192 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

despitefully use and persecute j^ou." Do all 
these things that ye may be like unto God, 
"that ye may be the children of your Father 
which is in heaven." 

When the young man made the direct 
inquiry, "What good thing shall I do that I 
may have eternal life?" Jesus answered: "If 
thou wouldst enter into life, keep the command- 
ments.^ 

"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, 
Xord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, 
but he that doeth the will of my Father which 
is in heaven." Salvation is the reward of obe- 
dience to the law. 

This religion is offered — not to the elect only, 
not to a chosen few only, but — to all who sin- 
cerely repent of their misdeeds. 

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and 
ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened 
unto you; for every one that asketh, receiveth; 
and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that 
knocketh, it shall be opened." 

"Blessed are they which do hunger and 



CHRISTIANITY RESTATED. 193 

thirst after righteousness for they shall be 
filled." 

God does not mock his children by inviting 
and urging them to do things which he knows 
they cannot do. 

Such is an outline of the religion which 
Jesus taught to his disciples, as we find it in 
the four Gospels. There are no priests, no 
altars, no sacrifices. Nor is there need of any. 
When God freely pardons the repentant sinner, 
what need can there be of sacrifices ? The love 
and reverence of pure hearts are better than 
sacrifices. Nor is any penalty demanded of 
the unrepentant sinner. It is punishment 
enough for such that they remain in their sins 
and fail to see the light. ' Christianity is the 
religion of love to God. It is perfectly natu- 
ral, nor is there anything supernatural about 5 
it. It is also love, good fellowship and good 
works among men whereby they become 
cemented into a holy brotherhood; all united 
to the Heavenly Father by the worship of 
pure hearts. 



19i CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 
PAULISM. 

Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, began his 
career as a teacher of Christianity somewhere 
from six to eight years after the death of 
Christ. He was a young man of learning, 
eloquence, talent and unbounded zeal. These 
qualities seem to have accorded to him a sort 
of primacy among the apostles. He traveled 
extensively and founded many churches in 
Asia Minor, Greece and Rome. It is in his 
epistles to the various churches which he had 
established, that Paul develops a plan of salva- 
tion radically different from that which Jesus 
had taught to his disciples. The fundamental 
doctrine of Paul's salvation is Original Sin — a 
doctrine which he w T as the first to promulgate. 
He imputes the sin of Adam to all his descend- 
ants, and thus makes every son and daughter 
of Adam's race born already condemned to 
eternal woe by reason of Adam's transgres- 
sion. 

In like manner Paul assumes that God, 
seeing the imperfection of the plan of salva- 
tion by good works under the law, and seeing 



PAULISM RESTATKD. 195 

the terrible consequences of this imperfection 
— sin entered into the world and abounding 
everywhere, and the whole human race, born 
and to be born, already under condemnation to 
eternal woe — seeing all these terrible results, 
God, purely and solely as an act of free grace, 
determined upon a new plan of salvation. To 
rescue and redeem the fallen race from their 
hopeless condition under the condemnation of 
the law, God determined upon a stupendous 
sacrifice. He sends his only begotten and 
well-beloved son, Jesus, into the world ex z 
pressly to be sacrificed to appease God's wrath 
and thus to place Him and man at one again. 
Jesus thus takes upon himself and bears away 
the sins of the world and thus relieves man- 
kind of the awful consequences of Adam's 
fall and places him again in a condition of 
possible salvation. "Christ redeemed us from 
the curse of the law." 

In Paul's plan of salvation, Jesus gets little 
credit for what he had done during his min- 
istry. Apparently in Paul's view of the case 
what Christ had done as a teacher was of little 



196 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

worth. It is only by his death, by_the shed- 
ding of his blood on the cross, that he bene- 
fitted mankind. 

Jesus taught that the remission of sins comes 
through repentance and forgiveness. 

Paul says: "Without the shedding of blood 
there is no remission of sins." "The gift and 
calling is without repentance." 

Jesus taught that salvation is the reward of 
obedience to the law, — the reward of obe- 
dience to God's will. 

Paul says: Knowing that a man is not jus- 
lifted by the works of the law, but by the faith 
of Jesus Christ, even zve have believed in Jesus 
Christ, that w T e might be justified by the faith 
of Christ and not by the works of the law, ' 'for 
by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. ' ' . 
And to clinch the matter conclusively and for- 
ever Paul says to the Galatians: "But though 
we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other 
gospel unto you than that which we have 
preached unto you, let him be accursed." 

Among men of the present day such lan- 
guage would be treated as mere bluster. It 






PAUJJSM. 197 

betrays in the speaker the consciousness of a 
weak cause. A just cause founded in truth 
solicits no such support. 

There is nothing exclusive in Jesus' plan of 
salvation. It is equally open and free to all 
with an equal chance of success for all who 
sincerely repent. 

On the other hand Paul teaches that it is 
only the elect that can be saved. 

Paul places the whole human family under 
condemnation to eternal woe to start with; 
and then proceeds to display his skill in devis- 
ing a way of rescue for a part of them. He 
formulates his scheme of salvation in the fol- 
lowing terms. "For as by one man's disobedi- 
ence many were made sinners, so by the obe- 
dience of one shall many be made righteous." 

But this is not all of the scheme. The 
sacrifice of Christ of itself relieved no one. 
This sacrifice is coupled with faith and inures 
only to the benefit of such as shall believe 
—only to the benefit of the elect of God's 
grace, only to those whom God preordained 
to eternal life from the foundation of the 



198 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

world. It is only to these that God bestows 
the special grace of faith. There is no 
salvation but by and through the merit 
of Christ's sacrifice. And those merits and 
that sacrifice are available onl}^ to those to 
whom God has given the special gift of faith. 

To restate the matter in its simplest form it 
seems to be this. 

God from the beginning had elected and 
preordained to eternal life, certain ones 
scattered along through the ages to come. But 
he now sees these elect ones involved with the 
rest in the universal catastrophe of Adam's 
transgression. This unlooked for result of 
his first plan necessitated a change. Accord- 
ingly God adopts a new plan of salvation by 
Grace and Faith, for the special benefit of the 
elect. (See Eph. 1:4 tog; Rom. 8:28 to 30). 

But so it fell out that Paul's plan of salva- 
tion by Faith and sacrifice was adopted by the 
primitive church and Christianity was left in 
the background. 

The consequence of this adoption was that 
ere long schisms, divisions, dis:ords, strifes 



PAULISM BEGETS DISORDER. 199 

and quarrels abounded in the bosom of the 
church itself. It was probably the cohesive 
force of the fear of persecutions and other 
dangers that helped more to hold the church 
in union during the first three centuries than 
any other single cause. 

Constantine in the beginning of the fourth 
century, threw over the church the protection 
of the empire. The direct effect of this action 
of the emperor was to relieve the hierarchy of 
any further fears of persecution, to relax their 
morals, and to launch the church as a whole 
upon a career of moral degeneracy and deg- 
radation which has no parallel in the history 
of mankind. 

The action of Constantine threw open the 
doors of the church to all comers. The 
clean, and the unclean alike entered. The 
honors and preferments of the church, which 
were many and great, were the objects of 
their ambition. The restraints of morality 
and religion were cast aside and the leaders 
contended, one against another like gladiators 
in the arena for a prize. 



200 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

The merits of Christ's sacrifice, to be imputed 
to the salvation of sinners, are vast and even 
exhaustless. This vast sum of merit was at 
once placed to the credit of the church and 
became its principal stock in trade. The prel- 
ates and priests immediately proceed to the 
work of imputing — that is to say, of selli?ig — 
this righteousness — only to the elect, of course- 
— but every comer was elect who had mone} T 
enough to pay for a mass — a pardon for 
himself or a friend in purgatory, or for an 
indulgence. 

With this exhaustless fund of merit as a 
financial basis, the career of the church under 
the regime of Paul's teachings was thus, 
auspiciously inaugurated and had practically 
a free run from Constantine to Luther — from 
the fourth to the sixteenth century. 

It has already been stated that the object 
of the hierarchy was to establish in the name 
of the church a universal empire, spiritual and 
temporal, that would be able to dominate all 
rivals. In support of this statement and as 
an evidence of the success of the hierarchy 



AGGRESSIONS OF THE CHURCH. 201 

in this ambitious undertaking, we quote the 
Constitution published by Pope Gregory VII 
about the year 1075 : 

"The Roman Pontiff can alone be called universal; 
he alone has a right to depose Bishops; his legates 
have a right to preside over all Bishops in a general 
council; he can depose absent prelates; he alone has 
a right to use imperial ornaments; princes are bound- 
to kiss his feet, and his only; he has a right to depose 
Emperors; no synod or council summoned without 
his commission can be called general ; no book can be 
called canonical without his authority; his sentence 
can be annulled by none, but that he may annull the 
decrees of all; the Roman Church has been, is, and 
will continue to be infallible; whoever dissents from, 
it ceases to be a Catholic Christain; and subjects may 
be absolved from their allegiance to wicked princes." 

Can the arrogance of unrestrained pride and 
ambition go farther? In the course of seven 
or eight centuries from the time of Constan- 
tine, the church had grown to these mon- 
strous pretensions. In the guise of a nursery 
of the true religion she had grown to be the 
terror of all Christendom. From the days of 
Constantine the church had bsen the insidi- 
ous foe, not alone of Christianity, but of 



J4 



202 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

civilization as a whole. Her shadow over- 
spread the earth — a vast incubus — a hideous 
nightmare destroying the repose and wasting 
the lives of the people. In the meanwhile 
Christianity had been blighted, paralyzed 
and smothered almost out of existence. It 
had been so deeply overlaid with the dogmas, 
rites and superstitions of the church that it 
was no longer visible in the world as a regen- 
erative force. And still it was more than 
four hundred years after Gregory flaunted 
these impudent assumptions in the face of 
Christendom before any relief came— four 
hundred years more of uninterrupted ecclesi- 
astical domination, of the night of Faith without 
Reason . 

Such was the natural and actual result of 
uniting politics and religion, on a faulty creed, 
for which the church called Constantine "the 
Great," and made him a Saint. It was only 
those of the hierarchy who had reason to thank 
Constantine. 

It is obvious that such tyramry as is implied 
in the constitutions of the church above quoted 



TKNDENCY OF CIVILIZATION. 203 

could not be long endured by any other than 
a very ignorant people. 

From that day to the present the hopes, 
the tendencies and the efforts of civilization 
have been in the direction of correcting the 
effects of that fatal error, of rescuing Chris- 
tianity and of restoring it to its rightful place 
as the religion of humanity. Some intrepid 
spirits here and there all along through the 
dark hours of that prolonged night had made 
abortive efforts to keep the spark of true Chris- 
tianity alive, but to little avail. It was not till 
the beginning of the sixteenth century that the 
intellectual development of the people came to 
the point where they could successfully chal- 
lenge the pretensions and practices of the 
church and emancipate themselves from its 
tyrannous control. 

WHAT WAS GAINED BY THE REFORMATION? 

The chief advantage gained by the Reform- 
ation w T as that it rescued a large part of 
Europe from the tyrannous grasp of the hier- 
archy. It emancipated the human reason and 



204 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

reinaugurated its reign as the guiding prin- 
ciple of man's life and conduct. It recognized 
and established man's right to free inquiry, to 
interpret the scriptures for himself and to form 
his own opinions in religious matters as in 
others. It released Christendom from the 
thralldom of the church and placed it in the 
line of progress. Hereafter the religious pro- 
gress of the human family may be looked for 
only along intellectual lines. The effort will 
be in the direction of rationalizing the doc- 
trines and practices of the church, of discarding 
many of its subtile refinements and irrational 
teachings, of correcting eironeous interpre- 
tation, of eliminating all together many of the 
beliefs and interpretations inherited from the 
Medieval Church and ol adopting and practic- 
ing the pure, simple and rational religion of 
Christ. 

It need hardly be said that the determina- 
tion of moral problems — of what is right and 
just, or of what is wrong or unjust — is no 
less a matter of judgment which each indi- 
vidual must determine for himself, than are 



CIVILIZATION PURIFIES THE CHURCH. 2(j5 

matters of dollars and cents. It is often said 
that Christianity is the fundamental element 
of our civilization. On the other hand is it 
not obvious that the Church owes its purifi- 
cation and progress to civilization ? When 
the Protestant Churches seceded from the 
Medieval Church in the sixteenth century, 
while they left behind them very much that 
was objectionable in the old religion, they 
carried with them many false doctrines and 
errors borrowed from the old Medieval 
Church. They took with them the Nicene 
Creed in its fullness, the belief in demonology 
and witchcraft, a personal devil, a hell of fire 
and brimstone. All these the Protestant 
Churches took with them and zealously taught 
for at least a century and a half after the 
Reformation — and are teaching some of them 
3 T et. Will any one dispute that in all this 
time the Protestant Churches were teaching 
gross errors ? And will any one dispute that 
it was the increased light of learning and 
science — mental growth — that drove these 
absurd beliefs out of existence and thus puri- 



206 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

fled the Church ? The Church, which is 
theoretically pure and ought to keep pure, 
should have no occasion to purify itself. But 
we know that the Church has taken on impur- 
ities and errors in times past; and it is plain 
that she does not purify herself through any 
inherent principle or sentiment peculiar to 
religion, but only through the media of intel- 
lectual causes operating from without. It 
is increased knowledge, greater intellectual 
light, a clearer perception of what is right, 
true and noble, as contrasted with what is 
wrong, false and debasing, that purines 
religion. After all is religion, in its last 
analysis, any other than a question of right 
and wrong? And the question of right and 
wrong is always a question of intellectual 
determination. And here is the true basis of 
rational religion. It is the intellect all the 
time, and not the will or the imaginary moral 
sense that guides the religious sentiment. 
When in the seventeenth century, increased 
enlightenment made it plain, not only to the 
common people, but even to the clergy them- 



KNOWLEDGE EMANCIPATES. 207 

selves, that witchcraft and demonology were 
mere delusions of a superstitious age, these 
direful scourges at once disappeared. The 
proof, as it appears to me, is conclusive to the 
effect that in times past, the Protestant 
Churches have taught and practiced the gross- 
est of errors and delusions which the light of 
civilization has enabled them or compelled 
them to abandon. It is therefore no wrong to 
the church to infer that it may still be teach- 
ing doctrines quite as erroneous as those 
which have been discarded. Does not the 
great diversity of opinion that exists in the 
Christian world concerning the truth and cor- 
rectness of the doctrines embraced in the 
Nicene Creed, justify us in the belief that we 
may look for the disappearance of that creed 
from the Christian Churches as the other 
errors and delusions have been expelled ? 

If one should go upon an inquiry to know 
by what authority Paul preached and taught 
his doctrines of salvation, even if he should 
search as far and as diligently as Ceres sought 



208 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOTOGY. 

for her lost daughter, he would at last return 
but ill satisfied. 

If he interrogates Philosophy, her oracles 
•are mute. 

If he consults Reason, she has to say : 
Paul's faith is not within our cognizance. It 
•lies wholly outside of our jurisdiction. We 
.can give no opinion. 

If he addresses his inquiry to the Common 
Understanding of men in general, the only 
.answer will be an incredulous smile, a shrug 
or perhaps a scoffing word, or, I cannot tell. 
I don't understand it. 

If in his search, he comes to the temple of 
Truth, and asks the presiding goddess by 
what authority, she shakes her head and says 
to him: These doctrines which Paul preaches 
are not of record here ; they are not my off- 
spring. I cannot answer your question. 

He comes to the temple of Justice and in- 
quires of the blind goddess holding the scales. 
She answers: Every man's account here is 
kept separately by itself. The only way to 
balance it is to weigh his merits against his 



BY "WHAT AUTHORITY? 209 

•demerits. We know not how to weigh one 
man's merits against another man's sins. In 
my jurisdiction t here ca n be no substitute of 
one to pay the penalty due by another Every 
man is credited with his own merits only, and 
must answer personally for his sins. 

If he appeals to Heaven Jesus world no 
doubt answer: These doctrines are new to me. 
I never heard of them during all the time I 
was. teaching in Palestine. Our Heavenly 
I Father does not require or desire sacrifices— 
4 especially human sacrifices. The only wor- 
ship acceptable to him is the homage and love 
of pure hearts. The way of salvation is plain. 
"If ye would enter into life keep the com- 
mandments." 

And finally if he consults the universal 
experience of Christendom for the last eigh- 
teen centuries, the answer will come thun- 
dering back : It was Discordia alone that 
sanctioned these doctrines. It is Pandora's 
Box, full of plagues, over again, thrown into 
the midst of God's temple. Cast it out. The_ 
/ Church will never be harmonious until Paul- 



210 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

ism is completely cast out. The Reformation 
was only begun in the time of Luther. It 
has been progressing ever since, but is not yet 
completed. The work begun then will only 
be completed when Christianity as taught by 
the Savior to his disciples shall have been 
fully recognized as the creed of the Christian 
Church. 

Paul taught these doctrines mostly — when 
not entirely — on his personal authority alone. 
"Take heed that no man deceive you." Who 
was Paul, that he should set up a rival system 
of religion, — that he should set aside Jesus' way 
of eternal life for one of his own ? Paul was 
simply a man, as men are today. He was no 
nearer to God and knew no more of God than 
men do today. What is Paul's way of salva- 
tion that we should accept it in preference to 
that which Christ taught to his followers? 
Reason, aided and strengthened by such light 
as may have come to him, is man's only guide 
in matters of religion as in other matters ot 
conduct. Every religion, every plan of salva- 
tion offered to man, must be examined, judged, 



WHO WAS PATJI,? 211 

and accepted or rejected by his reasoning fac- 
ulty as its merits or demerits may appear. Man , 
organized as he is, can act in no other way. 
Tried by the standard of reason the doctrine 
that God condemned the whole human family 
to eternal perdition on account of Adam's trans- 
gression, is not only unreasonable but mani- 
festly unjust. It impeaches God himself of 
injustice. Reason peremptorily rejects it as a 
fiction of the brain. And yet this doctrine is 
the very corner stone of Paul's system. With- 
out this universal condemnation there was no 
need of a new plan of salvation, — no need of 
God's grace. The foundation being removed, 
the whole superstructure falls. 

That Jesus was crucified by the Jews, osten- 
sibly as a malefactor, no one doubts; and the 
scriptures afford full evidence of that fact. But 
that God himself sent his Son into the world 
expressly to be offered as a sacrifice on the 
cross to propitiate God's displeasure and 
thereby to redeem mankind from the fatal con- 
sequences of Adam's transgression, is a doc- 
trine resting solely, I believe, on Paul's naked 



2L2 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

dictum. An assumption so extraordinary can 
only be believed on the most conclusive evi- 
dence. Reason opposes to it: (t) That God is 
a spirit and can only be worshiped spiritually. 
God does not require or desire to be worshiped 
by sacrifices; and never did. (2) Reason, obser- 
vation and experience all teach us that every 
man must answer for his own sins — that one, 
however sinless and pure he may be, cannot 
by his sacrifice justify the ungodly. The impu- 
tation of the merits of Christ's sacrifice to the 
relief of sinners is a delusion. We cannot 
accept such a doctrine, a doctrine so unnat- 
ural in itself, on the naked statement of a 
single individual. 

If our neighbor should voluntarily slay or 
sacrifice his only and well beloved son on 
account of the disobedience of his other chil- 
dren, we should require no further proof of his 
insanity; and would send him to the mad house. 
If the guilt}' members of the family, when 
prosecuted at the law for their criminal mis- 
conduct , should plead as their defense that the 
sacrifice of their innocent brother operated as 



PAUIJSM impracticable:. 213 

pardon for them and justified them before the 
law, they would only make themselves ridi- 
culous in the eyes of all sensible people. 

Paul's system of salvation is, in all its parts 
and as a whole, supernatural and as it appears 
to me, purely artificial. It is a survival of 
orientatism in a highly exaggerated form. It is 
therefore not adapted to the wants of mankind 
whose great need is a religion which they can 
understand and practice. A faith wholly unat- 
tainable unto man by any efforts he may make, 
but which comes only by the grace of God — 
as a special gift — which is bestowed only on 
those who have been elected to eternal life, of 
God's grace, from the foundation of the world, 
such a faith can manifest^ never be or become 
an element of human happiness or of human 
progress. 

Paul's plan of salvation is neither of the heart 
nor of the understanding. There is in it 
nothing to generate that hoty sympathy which 
warms and purifies all hearts towards one 
another, and unites all in love to the Heavenly 
Father; and no other subject of human interest 



214 CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGY. 

has employed half the attention, labor, ability 
and learning to elucidate and rationalize its 
doctrines and to make them appear acceptable 
to the human understanding. And with all, 
after a persistent trial of full eighteen cen- 
turies, the prospect of their success is far less 
encouraging than it was a century ago. In 
fact, that system seems to me now to be in a 
state of rapid decay. If Paul's plan of sal- 
vation were wholly unknown to Christendom 
until this day and were now presented to it 
for the first time for its acceptance or rejection 
on its intrinsic merits as a system of religion, I 
verily believe it would be peremptorily rejected; 
and its author pronounced a crank or a lunatic. 
The difficulty is that the church of the 
present day has inherited Paul's system of relig- 
ion. That system has come down to us from a 
remote past. The church of the nineteenth 
century did not choose that religion, but it has 
it — only because it has not the courage to get 
rid of it. That system of theology was fas- 
tened on the church in the beginning and the 
church has not been able to cast it off. The 



THE ONEY TRUE REUNION. 215 

progress of human thought is doing what the 
church of its own action has not been able to 
do. The nineteenth century has, to my mind, 
[ clearly outgrown that system of religion, and 
! has sufficiently revealed its imperfections and 
faults to insure its elimination in due course. 
The attempt to longer hold it up to man as the 
true way of salvation is only to keep a stum- 
bling block in the way of religious progress. 
The way of salvation which Jesus taught to 
his followers, is, I believe, the only true uni- 
versal and eternal religion of humanity. The 
Reformation will not be completed until 
Paulism and all forms of supernaturalism have 
been completely eliminated; and Christianity 
in its original purity has been adopted as the 
creed of the Church. 



JlkS8 1899 



